Malaysians Are One Of The Highest Spenders In The World When It Comes To Buying Books

We love it so much, in fact, this survey shows that Malaysia is ranked sixth globally when it comes to buying books, even more than countries like United Kingdom, Finland and Thailand.

In fact, our 'oUr CurrEnCy iS HighEr' neighbour Singapore came in dead last in the survey. But we get it, it's hard to find time to read when you're busy making money to buy our Perodua Myvi at RM197,000, right?

We have to say that the pool of people surveyed is pretty small - only 7,800 participants from 41 countries consisting of people who most likely do at least some of their shoppings online - but the findings are still pretty interesting.

The same survey also shows that most of the books bought by Malaysians were fiction, which can further be broken down by genre.

Thirty percent said that they prefer thrillers, 28% like crime, 27% read romance, 26% are into science and fantasy and 23% adventure.

About 22% of Malaysians said that they don't read and are not interested in books at all.

On the bright side, 74% of men and 78% of women said that they buy at least one book a year. Some buy them more often, with a small percentage even buying one book a month.

Despite the increase in interest globally in audio books, Malaysians still haven't shown much interest in them. Only about 5% of Malaysians bought audio books last year.

So, we can conclude that Malaysians do buy books, but do we read them?

According to the infographics above by the Education Ministry, a majority of Malaysian read the books the bought, but still, we are ranked 53 among 61 countries in the world when it comes to reading.

Yikes, that's not really good.