A few months ago, I found myself in a conversation at a book fair with a publisher from South Korea. We were comparing notes on what sells in our respective markets, and I was struck by how different our experiences were. In the US, fiction and narrative nonfiction dominate the bestseller lists. In South Korea, she told me, self-improvement and exam prep books are perennial top sellers, and literary fiction occupies a smaller but fiercely devoted niche. The conversation got me thinking about how reading habits vary across cultures, and I’ve been digging into the data ever since.

What follows is a survey of reading habits around the world, based on available research, industry reports, and conversations with publishers and booksellers in various countries. The data isn’t perfect. Measuring reading habits across cultures is tricky because different surveys define “reading” differently. Some count only books; others include magazines, newspapers, and digital articles. Some measure the number of books read per year; others measure hours spent reading. But even with these caveats, the patterns are interesting.

The World’s Most Voracious Readers

India consistently ranks as one of the countries where people spend the most time reading. A 2021 NOP World Culture Score Index survey found that Indians spent an average of about 10 hours and 42 minutes per week reading, more than any other country surveyed. This figure is striking, but it comes with context: India has a massive population of students and professionals for whom reading is a daily necessity, not just a leisure activity. Exam preparation, professional development, and religious texts account for a significant portion of that reading time. Leisure reading of fiction, while growing, is a smaller part of the picture.

Thailand came in second in the same survey, with readers spending about 9 hours and 24 minutes per week. China was third, at around 8 hours. These numbers surprised me, because the countries that tend to dominate discussions of “literary culture” in Western media, the US, the UK, France, Germany, didn’t even make the top five. Americans spend about 5 hours and 42 minutes per week reading, which is respectable but well below the global leaders.

The Nordic countries, which have a reputation for strong reading cultures, do well but not spectacularly. Finland, often cited as one of the world’s most literate nations, reports high rates of book reading (about 12 books per person per year, according to some surveys), but the hours spent reading per week aren’t dramatically higher than other developed countries. What distinguishes the Nordic reading culture is less the quantity and more the infrastructure: extensive public library systems, strong government support for literature, and a cultural norm that values reading as an activity worth protecting.

What People Read in Different Countries

The categories that dominate reading habits vary significantly by country, and these differences reflect cultural values, educational systems, and economic conditions.

In the United States, fiction accounts for roughly half of all book sales, with romance, mystery/thriller, and science fiction/fantasy being the largest genre categories. Nonfiction is dominated by self-help, health, biography, and political commentary. The US market is also characterized by a strong celebrity memoir segment that barely exists in most other countries. Americans’ appetite for books by and about famous people is distinctive and, from what I can tell, puzzling to publishers in other markets.

In Japan, manga (graphic novels) are a massive part of the reading landscape. The manga industry generates more revenue than the traditional book publishing industry in Japan, and manga readership spans all ages and demographics. It’s not unusual to see middle-aged businessmen reading manga on the train. The cultural status of comics in Japan is completely different from the US, where graphic novels have gained respectability in recent decades but are still sometimes treated as a lesser form. In Japan, manga is simply part of the reading diet, as normal as fiction or nonfiction.

In France, literary fiction holds a position of cultural prestige that it doesn’t quite match in the Anglophone world. The annual French literary prize season (the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina, the Prix Renaudot, and others) is a genuine cultural event, with prize-winning novels selling hundreds of thousands of copies. The French publishing industry is also notable for its dedication to the essay form: long-form intellectual argument published as slim books. This category, which sits somewhere between journalism and academic writing, is much more commercially significant in France than in the US or UK.

In Germany, nonfiction outsells fiction, which is unusual among major Western markets. German readers have a particular appetite for history, science, and current affairs. The Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest, reflects this: it’s as much a marketplace for serious nonfiction as for literary fiction. German publishers also have a strong tradition of translated literature, with a higher percentage of books translated from other languages than you’d find in the US or UK, where the translation rate is notoriously low (around 3 percent of published books in the US are translations).

The Digital Reading Divide

The adoption of digital reading varies enormously across the world, and the patterns don’t always follow the lines you’d expect.

In the United States and the United Kingdom, e-books account for roughly 20 to 25 percent of the book market by revenue. E-book adoption plateaued around 2014-2015 after several years of rapid growth, and print has held steady (and even grown slightly) since then. The pattern seems to be that e-books found their natural market share and stopped eating into print sales. Audio books, meanwhile, have been the fastest-growing segment of the book market for the past several years, driven by podcast culture and the ubiquity of smartphones.

In China, the situation is dramatically different. Digital reading, including web novels, serialized fiction on mobile platforms, and e-books, is the dominant mode of reading for many Chinese consumers. China’s web novel industry is enormous, with platforms like Qidian and Jinjiang hosting millions of serialized novels that are read on smartphones. Many of these novels are hundreds of chapters long and are updated daily. The business model is different from traditional publishing: readers pay per chapter or subscribe for access, and successful authors can earn substantial income from the platform. Some of the most popular web novels are eventually published in print form, and some have been adapted into television series and films.

In Africa, mobile reading is growing rapidly, driven by high smartphone penetration and limited access to physical bookstores and libraries. Platforms like WorldReader and Snapplify provide digital books to readers across the continent, and local publishing houses are increasingly making their catalogs available digitally. The growth potential is significant: Africa has a young, increasingly literate population and a growing appetite for locally produced content.

In Scandinavia, audiobooks have taken off in a way that even exceeds the US trend. Subscription services like Storytel and BookBeat (the Spotify of audiobooks, essentially) have made audiobook listening mainstream, and in Sweden, audiobooks now account for a substantial portion of the book market. Some Swedish publishers have expressed concern that the subscription model is depressing revenue, since readers pay a flat monthly fee rather than buying individual titles, but readers are consuming more books than ever.

Libraries and Public Reading Infrastructure

The strength of a country’s public library system tells you a lot about its reading culture. In Finland, there are more public libraries per capita than almost anywhere in the world, and they’re used heavily. Finnish libraries aren’t just book repositories; they’re community centers offering meeting spaces, maker labs, music studios, and digital resources. The new Helsinki Central Library, Oodi, which opened in 2018, is an architectural marvel that signals the value Finnish society places on public access to information and culture.

In the United States, public libraries are similarly well-used (about 54 percent of Americans have a library card), but funding varies enormously by state and municipality. Some American libraries are world-class institutions with extensive collections and programming. Others are chronically underfunded and struggling to maintain basic services. The patchwork nature of American library funding means that your access to books depends significantly on where you live, which has obvious equity implications.

In much of the developing world, public library infrastructure is sparse. Many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia have few public libraries relative to their populations, and those that exist often have limited collections and restricted hours. Mobile libraries, which bring books to communities on a rotating schedule, help fill the gap in some regions. In Kenya, for example, camel-mounted mobile libraries have delivered books to remote communities in the northeast since 1996. It’s an ingenious solution to a real problem, and it illustrates the lengths that some communities go to in order to provide access to reading materials.

The Role of Translation

How much of a country’s reading material is translated from other languages says a lot about its relationship to the wider world. Countries that translate a lot tend to have more diverse and cosmopolitan reading cultures. Countries that translate little tend to be more insular in their literary diet.

The United States is notorious for its low translation rate. Only about 3 percent of books published in the US are translations from other languages, which means that American readers are overwhelmingly reading American and British authors. This has consequences for the kinds of perspectives Americans encounter in their reading and for the commercial prospects of non-English-language authors trying to reach the American market.

Contrast this with countries like the Netherlands, where about 70 percent of published books are translations. Dutch readers have access to a vastly more diverse literary diet than American readers, simply because their publishing industry invests in translation. German, French, and Italian publishers also translate significantly more than their Anglophone counterparts, typically in the range of 10 to 30 percent of published titles.

The economics of translation are part of the explanation. Translating a book is expensive ($5,000 to $15,000 for a novel, more for specialized nonfiction), and the US market is large enough that publishers can fill their lists with English-language titles without investing in translation. In smaller language markets, translation is a necessity: there simply aren’t enough authors writing in Dutch or Danish or Finnish to supply the domestic market with new titles every season. So translation is built into the publishing model from the start.

But economics isn’t the whole story. There’s also a cultural attitude at play. In the Anglophone world, and particularly in the US, there’s a persistent (if often unconscious) assumption that the most important literature is written in English. This attitude is changing, slowly, helped by the growing prominence of translated literature in prizes and bestseller lists. But it hasn’t changed enough. American readers are missing out on an enormous body of excellent literature from around the world, and American publishers bear some responsibility for that.

Reading and Social Status

The social status of reading varies by culture in ways that affect how much people read and what they read. In some countries, being seen reading in public is a positive social signal. In others, it’s neutral or even slightly negative. These attitudes shape reading habits in ways that are hard to measure but real.

In France, reading is associated with intelligence and sophistication, and being seen with a book in a cafe or on the Metro is a minor social asset. French literary culture actively celebrates the reader as well as the writer. In Japan, reading on public transit is so common that it’s barely noticed, but the development of mobile reading (first on flip phones, now on smartphones) has changed the nature of public reading from a visible activity to a private one. You can’t tell anymore whether the person on the train is reading a novel or scrolling social media.

In the United States, the status of reading is more complicated. Among educated, urban, professional Americans, reading is valued and discussed. Among other demographics, reading for pleasure is less common and sometimes carries associations of bookishness or social isolation that are not entirely positive. The American relationship with intellectualism is ambivalent, and this ambivalence extends to reading. We admire successful writers and celebrate books that become cultural phenomena, but we’re also a culture that valorizes practical skills and action over contemplation.

The Gender Gap

In virtually every country where data is available, women read more than men. This is one of the most consistent findings in reading research, and it holds across age groups, education levels, and national boundaries. Women buy more books, read more books per year, are more likely to be library users, and are more likely to participate in book clubs and reading groups.

The gender gap is particularly pronounced in fiction. Women account for roughly 80 percent of fiction purchases in the US, according to industry estimates. In nonfiction, the gap is smaller, with some categories (military history, business, certain areas of popular science) skewing male. The publishing industry is acutely aware of this gap and designs, markets, and positions books accordingly. If you’ve ever wondered why so many novels have covers that seem designed to appeal to women, this is why.

The reasons for the gender gap are debated. Some researchers point to socialization: girls are encouraged to read more than boys from an early age, and this habit persists into adulthood. Others point to structural factors in education, where boys tend to develop negative associations with reading earlier than girls. Whatever the causes, the gap has significant implications for publishers. Reaching male readers, particularly for fiction, is one of the industry’s persistent challenges.

What the Data Tells Us

Looking at reading habits around the world, a few patterns stand out to me. First, reading is universal. Every culture reads, and the desire for stories, information, and ideas expressed in written form is a human constant. The forms differ (books, web novels, manga, serialized mobile fiction), but the impulse is the same.

Second, infrastructure matters. Countries with strong public library systems, robust publishing industries, and cultural institutions that support reading tend to have higher reading rates. This isn’t surprising, but it’s worth stating: reading is not just a personal choice. It’s a behavior that’s shaped by the availability of books, the affordability of books, and the social norms around reading.

Third, the definition of “reading” is evolving. The distinction between reading a print book, reading an e-book, listening to an audiobook, and reading a web novel on your phone is becoming less meaningful. What matters is engagement with extended narrative and ideas, and that engagement is happening across all these formats. The people who worry that “nobody reads anymore” are usually defining reading too narrowly.

At ScrollWorks Media, we publish for readers wherever they are and however they read. Our titles, from The Last Archive to Bitcoin for Absolute Beginners, are available in formats designed to reach readers across different habits and preferences. Explore our full catalog to see what we’ve been working on.