What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
I started reading very recently. In fact, it wasn’t until my sister gave me an e-reader around 2020 that I began seriously picking up books. As a child, I was never exposed to books, and I had always seen them as boring and intimidating. For some reason, I never had the motivation to read, and most importantly no one around me seemed to read either. It felt unnatural, to be seen picking up a book and reading it: a feeling that I think persists, if not more strongly, in the adult world I live in now. But recently I realised how remarkable it is to read: to be able to peer so easily into someone else’s imagined world through my own interpretation (hardly something you can do when you consume visual media). The words that had intimidated me for most of my life revealed themselves in all their elegance. Of course, countless studies have shown the risks of modern entertainment, and others have examined the literacy crisis and its consequences. They all raise important points, but I will leave them aside here for the sake of simplicity (go and read them yourself).
I have come to see how privileged I am to be in a position to read. Despite libraries offering books that anyone is free to borrow, and despite schools teaching children to read and encouraging them to do so, reading remains a largely inaccessible hobby. Why, then, is it inaccessible, even though it is technically—and literally—free?
I spent most of my life in Indonesia, a relatively poor country compared with where I have been living more recently (namely Hong Kong and the UK). People in developing countries, given their relatively low incomes and the lack of public infrastructure, often prefer instant gratification to longer-term alternatives. I feel this carries over into entertainment as well. For people living there, life is hard enough that an instant hit of endorphins from short-form content and mobile games is often treated as the panacea for their problems. You can easily watch ten short-form videos and feel happier; people there often do not have the luxury of half an hour to get through a chapter of a book, which I (subjectively) think is the least you need if you are to get anything out of a book and finish it properly.
Public infrastructure is also often poor enough that even the nearest library may still be out of reach, and with books expensive relative to living costs, giving children a phone seems the obviously better choice. Not only are phones “free”—in the sense that parents will most likely already own one—they are also a far more effective form of entertainment, in that they make people happier faster. And so childhood ends up being spent mostly, if not entirely, with a phone close at hand. In adulthood, people are too preoccupied with work, and with incomes relatively low, there is little disposable income left for books (or, in my case, an e-reader). Again, the country’s poor public infrastructure and people’s limited exposure to books as children make it unlikely that an adult will go the extra mile to visit a local library. This in turn creates a vicious cycle: a lack of interest in books and reading disincentivises the building of libraries, bookshops, and a healthy reading culture, which then leads to even less interest in reading all over again.
Lastly, education levels in Indonesia are still fairly low, which severely restricts the range of books people can read. According to the OECD, over 70% of Indonesians are reported to have low literacy skills. This means that even if they do want to read, the types of books they can manage are very limited. Literature is often calibrated to the linguistic proficiency of its intended audience. Unless they take up reading as children, there will likely be a mismatch between the books they can actually read and the books that would interest them. Empirically, there is also a comparatively limited body of literature in Bahasa Indonesia, and with Indonesia having one of the lowest English-proficiency rates in the world, finding the right book is often a challenge in itself. They are therefore restricted not only by the kinds of books they can read, but by the limited supply of books itself.
It should then be fairly clear how all of this ties in with the idea of “privilege”. Countries whose governments encourage reading through the active building and promotion of libraries end up with a more reading-capable populace. A family that lives in a developing country and is nevertheless wealthy enough to send its children to an expensive private school with better facilities will—alongside a number of other privileges—be more likely to take up reading as a hobby. In fact, I was born into one such family, and yet my greatest wish is for more people in my country to read: not only so that I might feel less isolated, but also to safeguard the written word in an era when its value feels fragile.