People and their books

In a country of nearly 200 million, Pakistan publishes only 2,500 books on average

It gets dark early in northern Norway these days. I travel routinely to Trondheim to engage with researchers in global health at the Norwegian Technical University (NTNU). On a relatively mild evening last week, I decided to go to the bookstore close to my hotel. It was a weekday and well past sundown. Yet, the bookstore was far from empty. Instead, it was doing a booming business. I thought perhaps there was an event or an author reading scheduled, but there was nothing of the sort. I came again, the next day, a little earlier this time. The scene at the bookstore did not look any different. Plenty of customers and a very busy checkout counter greeted me. Yet, there was no event and no special sales. Something did not quite add up. I went to another bookstore, just a few yards from the first one, and saw a similar atmosphere. I had to ask what attracted so many people, so I got in the checkout line to find out.

The bookseller, who was kind and patient, told me with a big smile that Norway in particular, and Scandinavia in general, is known for its love of books. Reading is very much a part of culture and Norway is among the top book publishing countries (per capita) in the world. I wasn’t sure if he was right, so I asked him, how many books are published every year in Norway. He did not know, but he pointed me to the national database. I came back to my hotel and started looking at national bibliographic databases. Much to my surprise, the bookseller was right!

On average, Norway publishes about 10,000 books per year, most of them in Norwegian. Most of these works are original and not translations. In a country of about five million, this comes to about one book per every five hundred people every year! Sweden, Denmark and Finland are not much different. Iceland, with a population of just over three hundred thousand publishes about 1,500 per year. That comes to about one book per every two hundred people.

I then started looking at Pakistan’s situation. In a country of nearly 200 million, Pakistan publishes on average about 2,500 books (the latest data on National Library of Pakistan’s website is from 2013 but the trend has been the same for several years). This comes to one book per eighty thousand people! Our neighbours on both sides (Iran and India) do much better than us.

The numbers themselves painted only half a story. The bigger devil was in the details. A significant number of the books published were self-help books ranging from becoming an expert in gharailoo ilaaj (household medical remedies) to the list of multiple-choice questions in CSS exams. Literature and literary analysis made only a quarter of the total books published. There were nearly as many books in the “religion” category (including lists and self-help books) as they were in literature. Science and technology painted a particularly sorry picture. A majority of the books in this category were simply textbooks. Other books on science were proceedings of conferences.

There can be many arguments on why we do such a dismal job in book publishing. Cost of publishing may be one issue but few people write books and even fewer are interested in buying, even those who have the means. A friend, who is a journalist in Pakistan and works in the English press, recently bragged that he has not read a single book in the last five years. Other friends in the circle came up with similar statistics. A family member told me that who needs books when you can “Google” anything. For me, these sentiments are a reflection of our relationship with the written word. Tweets and Facebook posts are no replacement for books, and as our relationship with books starts to fracture, so does our ability to construct a healthier society.

Scandinavia continues to lead the world in gender equality, social stability and the quality of life. There are many reasons for that — but I predict that relationship with books may have something to do with it.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 17^th, 2017.

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