Despite having one of the highest literacy rates in the world, Denmark’s Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt has expressed a need to fix the “reading crisis that has unfortunately spread in recent years”. In line with this outlook, Denmark’s government has vowed to eliminate the sales tax on books, hoping it would get more people to read. This predicament is not only Denmark’s to resolve; due to digital media and increased screen time, the book reading culture is on a steep decline globally. And Pakistan is no exception.
Multiple factors, including social decline and rote education, affect Pakistan’s already poor reading culture. But above all reasons stands a financial barrier that discourages even those who seek to read: while books are generally exempt from sales tax in Pakistan, printing services are not; and on top of that, locally produced paper routinely experiences extreme price hikes, making it difficult for publishers to keep costs down. While this issue is a global one as well, Pakistan deprioritises the need to keep cost of books down, unlike other countries. Across multiple well-known titles, Pakistani retail prices are generally twice as high as in India and Bangladesh, even after adjusting for currency differences. For certain titles, Pakistani prices are even four times higher than those in Bangladesh.
Book-reading is not merely a hobby. It is the backbone of a nation willing to challenge itself intellectually across multiple avenues. A growing number of countries are now shifting toward wood-free paper alternatives. They have erected libraries central to the public sphere. Initiatives are taken to ensure that the younger generation is not lost to this hurtling wave of digital tsunami. Pakistan must also join such countries by making books accessible across people of all socioeconomic classes.
