Italy: New Book and Ebook Reading Statistics Released

From an Istat (Istituto nazionale di statistica, Government Agency) News Release:

42% of people aged 6 and over (24 million est.) have read at least one book in the 12 months preceding the interview, for purposes other than school or work. The figure is stable as compared to 2014, after the decline started in 2011.
9.1% of the Italian households do not own any books, 64.4% own 100 books at most.
Women show a higher familiarity with books: 48.6% of women are estimated to be book readers, against 35% of men.
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Book reading remains much less frequent in the South of Italy, where fewer than one out of three (28.8%) person has read at least one book. In Sicilia and Sardegna, readers are 33.1%: an increase as compared to 31.1% recorded in the previous year.
In metropolitan centres the estimated percentage of book readers is 51%, vs. 38.1% in areas with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants.
Those who read or downloaded books or e-books in the last three months are estimated to be 4.5 million: 8.2% of the total population and 14.1% of those who surfed the Internet in the last three months.
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In 2014, Italian households spent 3,339 million euros for books and 5,278 for newspapers, printed matter and stationery: 11 and 18 euros per month, respectively, 0.4% and 0.6% of their total expenditure for final consumption.
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Between 2010 and 2014, household expenditure for books, newspapers and magazines decreased by 18%, that for stationery by 31%. That reduction is much higher than the one recorded by the expenditure for goods and services as a whole (6%).
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Between 2010 and 2014, household expenditure for books, newspapers and magazines decreased by 18%, that for stationery by 31%. That reduction is much higher than the one recorded by the expenditure for goods and services as a whole (6%).
Data in greater detail are available at http://dati.istat.it, under the heading “Culture, communication, leisure, time use”, sub-heading “press, mass-media, new media”.

Read the Complete News Release For More Data

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