Even though Vietnam’s publishing industry continues to grow, outperforming its digital counterpart, the national reading rate remains low, education insiders said at a seminar.

In its last meeting of the year on Sunday, The Sofa, a monthly book-themed discussion group held on Ho Chi Minh City’s Book Street since June, panelists talked publishing trends in Vietnam in 2016, with two keynote speakers representing the print and e-book sectors.

In his speech, Le Hoang, deputy chairman of the Vietnam Publishers Association, said while more books have been printed in Vietnam over the years, it remains an issue that few Vietnamese are fond of reading.

Hoang said textbooks and school reference books account for as many as 80 percent of the books available on the market. “The reading rate amongst Vietnamese is only one book per person per year if we exclude these two types of books,” he said.

Hoang attributed the poor reading rate to the fact that even Vietnamese adults do not read much, so they fail to encourage their children to build up a reading habit at an early age.

“Education is also to blame as the way students are taught at school is to follow what teachers tell them, so there is no need to read books after school to gain extra knowledge,” he said.

Hoang added that the Vietnamese only spend US$2 a year on books, compared to $10 by the Chinese and upwards of $200 for those in developed countries.

In April, Deputy Minister of Education and Training Pham Manh Hung said that Vietnam’s reading rate is only four books per person per year, 2.8 of which are textbooks.

This number is a fifth of the number in countries such as France, Japan and Israel, according to the deputy minister.

Print outplays e-books

Speaking at the discussion, Tran Phuong, who represented online book platform Alezaa, said that Vietnam’s e-book market failed to grow as much as expected.

“The e-book market growth rate is now flat,” he said, implying that digital books had failed to win over local readers.

E-books accounted for only 0.5 percent of Vietnam’s book market, Phuong said, adding that the average figure across Southeast Asia is three percent.

In the first half of this year, the country’s biggest publishers, Fahasa and Phuong Nam, both reported growth of more than 20 percent in the number of books sold, which Hoang said was a “positive sign of the market.”

Hoang also said that the number of print books sold last year had jumped 11 percent from 2014, indicating that “our publishing industry is growing well.”