Literacy: Worldreader 2019 (Top Books Read By Worldreaders, Year-End Statistics)

From The Literacy Ledger Blog:

In 2019, over two million people read books from the Worldreader library on their mobile phones. In total these readers accessed a whopping 6,536,667 books!

These readers were scattered around the globe and read books in 52 different languages, from English and Arabic to Kiswahili, and Hindi.

In some countries, we were excited to see particularly large spikes in the number of readers in comparison to last year. For example, our readership grew by 36% in Ethiopia, 55% in Burundi, and by 13% in both Sierra Leone and Malawi.

Reaching more readers with Opera

88% of our mobile readers in 2019 accessed our library via the Opera Mini browser. Since 2015, Opera has featured Worldreader’s library as a bookmark on the Opera Mini browser, giving millions more readers access to a digital library at their fingertips.

[Clip]

While smartphones are becoming increasingly affordable and widely available, their rates of penetration are still low in many developing countries. There are 1.3 billion feature phone users, most of them in Asia and Africa. This explains why over half of our mobile readers in 2019 accessed the Worldreader digital library via their feature phones.

The remainder of the WorldReader post includes the top books read by Worldreaders during 2019 in these categories:

• Children’s Books
• Young Adult Books
• Life and Career Skills Books
• Inspiring Books

Direct to Complete Blog Post

Filed under: Digital Collections, Interactive Tools, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users