In April, the Marvelous City celebrated the official opening of Rio de Janeiro as the World Book Capital, a title granted to the city by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The last cities selected by UNESCO were Sharjah (2019), Kuala Lumpur (2020), Tbilisi (2021), Guadalajara (2022), Accra (2023) and Strasbourg (2024).
Over the course of a year, Rio will have an agenda of events and actions aimed at formulating new public reading policies. The city government has highlighted the Book Biennial, from June 13 to 22, and a special edition of the Jabuti Prize, that will be held for the first time in Rio de Janeiro.
The program also includes activities in municipal libraries, exhibitions in museums, literary cafés, poetry readings, literary fairs, and cultural interventions in the city’s main public transport terminals.
Few readers
The title given to Rio de Janeiro is an opportunity to rethink reading programs and access to books throughout the country. The 6th edition of the ‘Retratos da Leitura no Brasil’ survey, released in 2024, shows that there was a reduction of 6.7 million readers in the country.
The survey conducted by the Instituto Pró-Livro also indicated that the proportion of non-readers was greater than that of readers for the first time in the historical series.
In the three months prior to the survey, 53% of people did not read even part of a book, whether printed or digital, of any genre, including textbooks and religious books. Considering only entire books read in the same period, the percentage was 27%.
The survey was conducted in 208 cities. The majority of readers are female (50.4%), with the age group from 11 to 13 years old reading the most (81%). The South Region had the highest proportion of readers (53%). Next come the North (48%), Central-West (47%), Southeast (46%) and Northeast (43%) regions.
Another issue to be considered is the price of books and the purchasing power of Brazilian consumers. The 9th Brazilian Book Retail Panel, produced by the National Union of Book Publishers (Snel), showed that the average price of a book in the country rose 12.20%, reaching R$51.48.
Another survey, by the Brazilian Book Chamber (CBL), reinforces the Snel data. In the latest survey, only 16% of the Brazilian population over 18 years of age said they had bought at least one book in the last 12 months.
Source: Agência Brasil