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This is a question posed by quite a few bloggers active in the effort to reverse the policy of imposing import duties on books.

La Nueva Liga Filipina has been the fiercest in insisting that the battle isn't over yet, and that if political momentum has been generated, it must be sustained:

We now have the initiative. We have the enemy on the run. We must maintain the momentum and not let it go to waste. Guys, we have a good thing going here.

Entonces, I now recommend that we push on and now demand the resignations of Undesecretary Sales and Customs examiner Rene Agulan for embarrassing our country before the international community.

village idiot savant has a similar point of view:

Even its resolution calls for some pause. It looks and feels like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has struck a blow for book-lovers everywhere. Remember: it was her Secretary of Finance that imposed the tax in the first place, and being a cabinet position, it was, effectively, an extension of her office. If she caved, it was because it was an opportunity to look good, not to acknowledge the DoF's and the BoC's violation of the Florence Agreement. It cannot be properly called a victory without censure of these offices' flawed interpretation of the law.

Both also say that it isn't enough to identify problems, but that work needs to be done to propose solutions. He is not alone in pointing this out. 1ReAd2 says there remains the problem of public libraries:

There is still a need to develop other avenues by which everyone can avail of the book and one of this is develop our public library system. Promote and develop them.

Not everyone can afford to buy a book. Not everyone has a credit line to buy a book. This is where or this where a library, public or otherwise can fill the gap.

Or that returning to the status quo ante is not particularly something to cheer about, as My World describes it, lifting book duties will have an effect on prices that are still high:

A “really good (imported) book” in the Philippines, hard bound, excellent paper quality written by a noted author can command a price of upwards 2000 pesos. The paperback edition of such book with nice paper quality sells at around Php1500 to Php2000. A “good book” (one in which the author is not that popular) with a nice paper quality typically sells around Php1000 – 1500. Between Php800 – Php1000 are the “downsized” version of a typically good book or the so – called mass paperback copies. Below Php500 are books whose printed pages are of newsprint quality. By comparison, in China, a paperback edition book with nice paper quality costs around Php300 – 400 (converted already) tops. As a matter of fact, last December, during my vacation in China, I’ve bought 7 books for 341 RMB or roughly Php2500 total. Imagine 7 books for the price of 2 or maybe even 1 bought in the Philippines (the books I’ve bought in China are scholarly works on Chinese History). Now that is expensive. It is due to this high price of books that book buying and collecting is fast becoming an expensive “hobby” of the “well – to – do”. A “financially struggling” individual can’t “afford” to read and collect books even if he loves books. It is for this reason that an imposition of a few percentage points of custom duties on the cost of books would only make books more expensive and the matter worse. However, it won’t be that bad if we have a “functioning” public library system instead of a pathetic one that we have now.

School Librarian in Action noticed the lack of engagement by librarians, as organized professionals, in the issue, but takes a positive attitude:

I'd like to think that most Filipino librarians are battling their own professional issues and problems that to make a noise on the TGBB is just too much to do for now. I would like to think that somewhere out there, Filipino Librarians are quietly transforming their libraries into places where the public can freely access information from printed and online media.

Philippine Commentary would be somewhat pleased with the above, because in his view, the call of the times is to hasten the demise of the book and to encourage, instead, the consumption of books as digital files.

Indeed it seems to me that the healthy thing about online advocacy is that it helps cure -or remedies- a basic weakness of public causes and those involved in them, which is, the disinclination of many participants to take stock of what took place, so that lessons, hopefully, can be identified, learned, and institutionalized.

There seems to be a lot of angst in that the supposedly successful resolution of the whole campaign has revealed it to be a primarily Middle Class cause. As Cocoy put it in Filipino Voices:

Victory is sweet. Who would have thought we could change Government’s mind?

The sad part of it, as much of our people care more about Kho’s, Belo’s and Halili’s sex life. We won this victory without 95% of our people understanding why it was fought in the first place and why this is important. We fought this battle largely without network television and hardly any support from the daily newspapers. Heck, I don’t think they know it was fought at all.

The frightening and dangerous thought is that if this was won largely without popular support, in the next engagement, should we bother getting them onboard? That to build this nation, do we still need them? Are they immaterial to the larger war? Dangerous question, correct?

People saw the book blockade, this war on book taxes and duties as a war of the elite. How many people who joined this crusade who are actually multimillionaires but instead are ordinary people, living ordinary lives who love books?

Now there were those ambivalent about the issue from the very start, because of its bourgeois characteristics or, to be more accurate about it, because of their disdain for anything smacking of the bourgeoisie. This was clearly expressed in stuart-santiago and by caffeine_sparks in Filipino Voices, but the answer may be in another portion of the same entry by sparks:

“Did you see who carted away the books first?” I murmured a negative, having come a bit late. He motioned his head to the inhabitants of the Manila Bay area, skin darkened from sleeping underneath the naked sky. To be clear I said, “You mean the Great Unwashed carted most of the books away?” In a conspiratorial way only journalists would ever be able to manage, he murmured an affirmative. “You see, we the so-called enlightened ones like to assume the hoi polloi would never care for books. But right there, before my eyes, was proof that isn’t true.” Indeed. The printed word is a luxury for many. In our little enclaves we tend to forget the great privilege of being able to make sense of letters strung together. What jewels they must be for those whose precious monies must be spent on not starving.

Now this may or may not suggest by even the Divided Left had both its main branches speaking out against the book duties, but was it out of genuine concern for issue, or a desire to pander to the Middle Class, a manifestation of United Front politics? Nonetheless, Stuart-Santiago's, caffeine_sparks' point of view was also echoed by The Zeppelin's Mezzanine:

But I just can’t help but wonder. If the power of the Internet-driven Pinoy community was that great, it’s a wonder people haven’t tried to levy for a decrease in gasoline prices via Facebook. Or they hadn’t called for the exposition of First Gentleman Mike Arroyo by Twitter. Heck, it’s actually a wonder that there aren’t any online petitions calling to end Jejomar Binay’s plans to run in the 2010 elections.

See what I’m talking about? The curious variable in this whole mess was that the only reason these guys went to the streets – er, what’s the Internet equivalent? – was because it involved something they held to be important. This only serves to point out the old adage of infernal dynamics: The energy required to move an object in the correct direction, or put it in the right place, will be more than you wish to expend but not so much as to make the task impossible.

Meaning people will only move when they think the cause is worth their while. But as to what my own demographic considers important, well. You could say that that’s a whole new ball game.

Personally, I believe our civic sense to have become so thoroughly enfeebled, that any small victory -and the victory, perhaps small though it may be and possibly even temporary, becomes a large one, if only because there have been so few instances where domestic public opinion actually led to official action and someone in officialdom relenting- is worthy of celebration in and of itself.

Also, surely it's also worth considering the perspective that Middle Class empowerment is a good thing, and a necessary thing, if politics is to be about the national community and not just a winner-take-all battle between its constituent parts. If there is to be pluralism and not just triumphalism on the part of segments of the population, then the entire apparatus has to be seen as responsive to a Middle Class that has been so enfeebled, politically, as to have boycotted the country by voting with its feet and pursued permanent emigration abroad.

Now on to something else that Cocoy thinks, which is that,

This battle was won largely because the diverse group used cyberspace to get our message across. We were heard in the halls of the US Embassy. We were heard in twitter and facebook. We were heard in the UN. And those entities helped put in pressure on our government who would normally wait for the storm to pass.

The Internet isn’t just a delivery mechanism for sex scandals. It is a delivery mechanism to help change the world.

Perhaps a bit premature, methinks, and a tad colonial-minded in that "we were heard in the halls of the US Embassy" seems to be perceived as an achievement in itself. We do not know, and there seems no reason to think, the US Embassy lifted a finger in terms of this issue; although it is remarkable that the Americans -or, to be precise, an American in the embassy staff- told David Hemley that the issue made them reconsider their previous low opinion of the effectiveness of the Internet when it comes to mobilizing people.

I do believe that the the Internet made possible the story's emergence in the first place. David Hemley -an American, one less inclined to take official impositions sitting down, which is what Filipino book importers were inclined to do- wrote about it online.

His story was tremendously easy to reproduce, because of that; and a constituency was revealed because of that story. More remarkably still, the story was enriched because of the initiative of blogs like Philippine Genre Stories that didn't just take Hemley's word at face value, but dug around deeper. The online buzz forced at least a token nod in the direction of all the online agitation going on, on the part of mainstream media, though I personally suspect mainstream media viewed the issue with ambivalence because it tends to view most things through the same Class Struggle lenses that made some bloggers ambivalent about the issue, too.

Anyway, if the story would not have otherwise emerged, if not for the internet; if the story wouldn't have spread, without the internet; if the internet made possible people not only expressing personal indignation, but discovering they didn't exist in impotent isolation, but actually formed a constituency, then the view of Cocoy is valid.

But I'd like to point out one shortcoming, and that's of official perception and even, of what gets officials to act. In a sense, even as online media and organizing proved its clout with this issue, it also demonstrated the residual power of the traditional print media: if only because the ferocity of print commentary kept the issue from being totally shrugged off by both print reporters and radio and TV media.

I must say though, that I'm on shaky ground on this one, as I might simply be seeing this through the self-satisfied eyes of a print opinion writer. Though I was told that it was the direct challenges to UNACOM that prodded it into hastening the release of its statement, which the Department of Finance never wanted released at all.

There are officials, though, who are surely of the impression that the whole issue had nothing to do with the internet, or put another way, that the internet was irrelevant in the resolution of the issue. What resolved it was media noise, which gave one faction within the President's official family, the nerve to challenge another; but that in the end it was a matter of getting the President's ear, and her stepping in to stop the official squabbling.

But be that as it may, perhaps the celebrations and soul-searching are premature. See Gov’t urged to totally scrap tariffs on imported books in BusinessWorld. As The Grin Without A Cat says, vigilance!

This morning I got an e-mail from Davao City, bringing an article to my attention, and asking me to do an episode of The Explainer on it.

Let me quote from that e-mail:

I wonder if you have discussed the issue on 'online writing' in your show...

Pity that I didn't run a thread before working for them. It turned out that we were writing academic papers for lazy students abroad. But while on it, I would receive follow-up phone calls at 12 midnight or 4am from who I believe to be a Filipino call center agent (the accent). It's like Filipino professionals helping foreigners to rip off Filipino professionals.

I asked the sender if the information above came from person experience, and here's a portion of the reply:

It's a shame Sir, but I did for almost 2 weeks this April 09. I remember making a historiographic essay on Joan of Arc and an architectural analysis of The New York Times Heardquarters building...

Then, I saw this report on Fox (or CNN, not sure now) which discussed about the triviality of the homework and a local school's effort of purging the practice due to the number of essay mills offering custom papers for a pay.

So I quit and run a thread online. I learned that a number of Filipino writers (and Indians) have been scammed since 2006! Most of them got quite nasty while a few felt like their passion was ill-used (helping students to cheat).

Finally, this person's views on why the issue needs to be discussed:

As a Filipino and a teacher at that, I feel like in the losing end if this will be discussed by foreign media. The question on ethics, plagiarism, the parasitism of the third world, the (in)dignity of the Filipino professionals, the practice being currently adapted in our colleges and universities... among others... I guess, need to be comprehensively discussed.

The article in question is Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply: From Virginia to Manila: on the trail of papers for cash published in The Chronicle of Higher Education.In a nutshell, the article is an expose on companies that write academic papers for a fee. A case study of sorts is used in the article, focusing on entrepreneurs from Ukraine who set up dummy American companies and then operate an academic paper sweatshop in the Philippines:

Call any of the company's several phone numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night. The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.

If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls, The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering any questions.

But while the company's management may be publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since 1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.

The company's customer-service center is located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students. The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.) One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link builders.

Some of the company's writers work in its Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers, which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between $1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted professional writing companies in the industry."

It's difficult to know for sure who runs Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr. Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.

Installed in its Makati City offices, according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."

So there you go. The article includes a presentation, Journey to the Center of an Essay Mill, which gives an online tour of what essay-mill writers see when they log on to the company's website.

(Above: scans of AAQ's and MLQ's bookplates; though rarely used today, bookplates used to be a highly-developed form of personal expression) I've been meaning to start a series on we, the people, as the political strategists and advertising people understand us, and the ongoing controversy about the Book Tax has helped kick-start the process. This entry was triggered by blogger 1ReAd2 asking,

I wonder if the present policy is a reflection if we really are a book reading country. For several years we have been touting our literacy rate … Yes we can read but do we read? Or is reading the enclave only for the privileged and for the lucky ones. And is there a place where people who cannot buy books go and get to read books. Do we have enough libraries and does government support and promote such libraries to be alternatives for people to do research and read?

Well, what, indeed, do we know? Back in December 12, 2007, I mentioned the latest National Readers Survey, commissioned by the National Book Development Board. It was the second of its kind, the first being in 2003. The NBDB's recommendations, based on the 2007 survey, makes for ironic reading today:

The challenge is for booksellers and publishers, printers and paper and ink manufacturers, to make more books affordable. The government can facilitate this, as well as the financing of technology upgrades to make operations more efficient and economical.

How many of us read, and what do we read, and have the percentages changed? The following chart, based on overall national percentages, indicates a consistent decline in the percentages who read various types of reading materials: As Queena Lee-Chua put it, in 2007 (see readings below),

Generally, the survey shows that reading has slightly declined in our nation. Only 92 percent of respondents say they read, down two percent from 2003. The reading of books, comics, newspapers, and magazines has gone down, by seven, 13, 14, and 15 percent, respectively. Ninety-six percent of urban respondents read, compared to 88 percent in the rural areas. This may be explained by the lack of access to reading materials in areas far from city centers. Reading has also declined across all socioeconomic groups, except those in the AB class. Public school students now read fewer books, newspapers, magazines, and comics than they did in 2003, and as for private school respondents, the slight increase in reading today is only among those reading comics.

However, take a look at the demographic breakdown of people who read, by age, socio-economic class, and by region. You'll notice that there's a healthy improvement overall (tremendously so in the Visayas, followed by Mindanao), except in the National Capital Region, and it's the decline in the NCR that seems to have affected the overall national percentages: Again, Queena Lee-Chua's explanation:

Why the decline? One culprit is the National Capital Region (NCR). Surprisingly, the NCR is the only cluster in the country where reading has decreased, by five percent. In Luzon areas outside NCR, readership has actually increased by two percent, and in Mindanao, readers have held steady. Despite the proliferation of bookstores, publishers, and libraries in the NCR, book readers have decreased by a whopping 31 percent, from 95 percent in 2003 to 64 percent in 2007. Magazine readers in the NCR have decreased by 27 percent, comics readers by 12 percent, and newspaper readers by 10 percent. But there is good news elsewhere. In the Visayas, general readership has increased by four percent. Readers of books in the Visayas increased by 11 percent; comics readers, by 10 percent; magazine readers, by one percent. (Newspaper readers have decreased by four percent.) It is interesting to note that NBDB has done a lot of intervention programs in the Visayas, such as the Booklatan community reading activities, which may possibly have accounted in part for the increase.

And here are figures concerning the age at which people start getting into reading non-textbooks (people are getting into the reading habit at a younger age): Queena Lee-Chua puts it this way, as good and bad news:

The youth are leading the way. They start to read non-school books at age 16, on average, one year earlier than in 2003. Again, NCR is the poor exception—young people here start reading non-school books at age 18 on average, two years later than the national norm. Unfortunately, reading has declined across all age groups, except again for the youth, those in the 18 to 24 age bracket, where the percentage of readers has in fact gone up.

Another chart suggests that if you look at people who read, the percentage of those who read books other than textbooks, is increasing sharply: Here are additional details concerning our national reading habits, mainly concerning books other than textbooks (which are required readings). Here are the top influences on our reading habits: And a NBDB pie chart on the reasons people give for not reading: Here are answers to the question, "When did you last read a non textbook book?" And how often do people read books? There seems to be a decline in monthly book reading, and an increase in the percentage of those who read a non-textbook less than once a year. Could it be because we seem to be highly utilitarian readers, with only a small minority who read for pleasure? Or could it be a factor of language? Here are figures comparing the languages in which books are published, and read, with the languages people actually prefer: And also, here are our preferences when it comes to domestic, foreign, or a mix of foreign and domestic authors: When it comes to the kinds of books we like to read, these are the top-rating titles or types: Followed by these kinds of books: (proponents of the Reproductive Health Act will notice the increase in popularity of the Bible; and yet, that books on Family Planning are pretty popular, too, but possibly subsumed within the subset of non-Bible fans?) As to the means people use to acquire books, it seems many more get their hands on books by borrowing them or being given books as gifts, than actually spend money to get books: Could it have something to do with whether it's easy or difficult to find a bookstore or library? When it comes to noticing things about the books we read, here's what sticks in people's minds: Some added details: And some more: So Queena Lee-Chua summarizes things as follows:

Pinoys read anytime they want. Evidently, reading non-school books is not a habit for most people, except for some who read before going to sleep. The number of books read in the past year is seven on the average. An average of seven books a year is not too bad, but what is alarming is the median number of books read, which is a low three. This means that even if half the adult population of the Philippines have read three or more non-school books in the past year, the other half have read only at most three, or worse, no books at all. Why do we read? More than 85 percent of the respondents read to gain knowledge or more information. The rest read for enjoyment. Almost half of the readers read books by Filipino authors only, while the other half read both local and foreign books. However, the majority of the respondents, whether they read or not, have few books at home.

But something that I think ought to be emphasized is the relatively small volume of books bought and sold, when you set aside textbooks. Here are some interesting figures taken from the NSBC website on the volume of books imported (presumably by commercial firms, and not by the public at large) compared to the volume of books we export: And an interesting set of figures provided by Dominador Buhain (see readings below) concerning the publishing and book-related firms that have flourished and those that haven't (book importers and bookstores had negative numbers): In connection with the above, let me point to two versions of a speech by Tony Hidalgo, who is an innovative publisher, and who is never loath to share his knowledge (and opinions) with others. The earlier (and longer) version of his speech dates to July 29, 2005 and was reproduced in FilipinoWriter.com; the later version dates to December, 2007 and appears in the website of his firm, Milflores Publishing. Here's an extract from the earlier speech, which answers the question posed at the beginning of this entry:

It is simply not true that Filipinos don’t read—they do. In fact, the Inquirer recently ran a story on an international survey that shows that Filipinos, on the average, read more books than the Chinese, Koreans, or Indians do and that our readership of books is pretty high when compared with other Asian countries. A 2003 SWS survey of reading attitudes and preferences of Filipinos showed that 90% of Filipino adults have read books and 68% have read non-school books. Filipinos read books that they think they need or want. This accounts for the sustained success of large publishers that specialize in romance novels in Filipino and in religious books.

However -and this is where Tony Hidalgo, referring to the original, 2003 Survey, helps make sense of the findings- there is a problem of language:

One of the most dramatic findings of the survey was that 57% of Filipino adults prefer to read non-school books in Tagalog (Filipino), 30% prefer English, and 13% prefer Cebuano. According to the survey, there are nearly twice as many readers who prefer to read in Filipino than those who prefer to read in English. Alternatively, we could say that local books in English cater to less than a third, or 30%, of the potential market for books in the country. I have discussed this finding with many friends who are involved with books as writers, editors, publishers, intellectuals, etc. and it never fails to inflame passion. I have concluded that this is because the finding is counter-intuitive to those whose first language is English and who think that the rest of the country is like them. Yet, the SWS survey finding is supported by other data. Rey Duque, when he was editor of Liwayway a couple of years ago, told me that the circulation of his magazine was a hundred thousand during bad times and 250 thousand during good times. Compare this with the circulation of magazines in English that also carry short stories, like the Free Press and the Graphic, which sell far fewer copies per issue. For me, of course, the best corroborating evidence to the SWS survey are the book sales of my own company. I wrote a series of four manuals (two with short stories) on cockfighting originally in English. Then, I translated all four into Filipino. These books have identical content and their covers and illustrations are by the same artist, Manuel Baldemor. They are sold on the same shelves in the same bookstores. The only difference between them is that the English books are sold at P190 per copy because they are in book paper, while the Filipino books are sold at P150 because they are in newsprint. Except for this difference, the framework approaches that of a laboratory experiment so that any difference in sales between the English and Filipino versions could be confidently attributed to the language used. The Filipino versions have been outselling the English ones for more than a decade now by a ratio of about two to one.

A little later in his speech, he explores this question in greater detail:

Another important constraint is the mismatch between the books that the best Filipino minds write and the needs and preferences of readers. Most Filipino books are still written in English though most readers prefer books in Filipino. The best Filipino writers still concentrate on writing fiction (novels, short stories, plays) and poetry in English, while 9 out of 10 book buyers want information books. Because of class differences in lifestyles and experiences, the content of the best Filipino literature in English is often at odds with what most readers want from fiction, so they turn, instead, to the movies, telenovelas, and romance novels. The gap between most readers and the best writers exists in many other ways—even in the visual aesthetics of books. The covers and layouts of books on the Philippine literature shelves are highly Westernized—clean, crisp, modern, and sparing in the use of space. Those on the more masa shelves like the spaces for the romance novels in Filipino and the texting humor booklets are more crowded and baroque, closer to the aesthetic of the masses. Most readers ascertain which books were written for them through their visual look, so they shun the literature shelves and crowd the other ones. The small, but affluent, A and B market is fluent in English and should be the natural market for Filipino literature in English by the best writers. Unfortunately, this segment is also highly Westernized and prefers books by foreign authors. Some of them are even unaware that there is now a fairly large body of work by Filipino authors in English.

Hidalgo also looks at the utilitarian aspect book reading, and this brings up the question of cost (as well as demographics and the health of various demographics):

According to the SWS survey, 91% of those who had read a non-school book did so to get information or gain additional knowledge, while 9% read for enjoyment or amusement. Again, our sales figures validate this finding. Our best-selling information book, Grammar Review in our English grammar series, sells nearly a thousand copies a month, while our best-selling literary title in our humorous essays series, Suddenly Stateside, averages a little less than a hundred copies a month, although, of course, the former book is only about half the price of the latter book, so that some of the difference in sales could be due to price. The survey found that young adults from ages 18-24 read more non-school books, five per year on the average, than older adults. This finding must be coupled with the unique demographics of our country. We have one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 2.3% annually. This means that each generation is much larger than the previous one, for there are more and more parents in each generation to beget even more children in the next one. To understand this exponential population growth, we need only consider that our population in the mid-fifties was a little more than 20 million, while now it is more than 85 million. Obviously, the young far outnumber the old in our country because of our demographic trends. The dominance of young readers in the market is further heightened by the fact that not only do they outnumber the old, but they also read more books than the old, on the average, because they are more curious and have better eyesight. Another important finding of the survey was that a large majority, 58%, of those who bought non-school books for personal reading spent P200 or less on these books for the entire year. Obviously, affordability levels for books are quite low because of the widespread poverty in our country.

He also points out that

The limited reach of bookstores in our country is another limiting factor. All publishers sell the bulk of their production through bookstores, since this is more efficient than direct sales to the general public. Therefore, the market for books of publishers is basically that portion of the total market that has access to bookstores. In an article in the December 2004 issue of Book Watch, Karina Bolasco of Anvil Publishing, Inc. (a sister company of National Bookstores and one of the larger publishers) said that Anvil’s research in 1995 showed that there are, at most, 2,500 bookstores in the entire country, or one bookstore, on the average, per 34,000 people. The Anvil mapping of these stores showed that most of them were concentrated in Metro Manila and the National Capital Region (NCR). In Mindanao, there are far fewer bookstores and the average in Regions 9 and 12 is about one bookstore per 200,000 people.

And finally, an interesting insight into the backwardness of some aspects of printing, as well as the toll browsing takes on publishers' profits:

At the operational level, local printing, though relatively cheap because of lower labor costs, is generally of poor quality due to outdated technology and poorly trained workers. We sometimes get as much as 5-10% rejects in our print runs. This forces us to inspect each and every book to protect our readers and our reputation. This is costly because the print runs of some of our most popular books in our English grammar series are 10,000. Some printers also try to cut costs by using paper of lower quality than that specified by the publisher. An operational problem stemming from poverty is that some readers use bookstores as public libraries—they read books while standing without buying them. This destroys many books—our rate for popular books is about 5% of the books we place on the shelves. All bookstores simply return damaged books and publishers have to take the loss. This has forced us to wrap all our books in plastic to discourage reading without buying, and this has increased our production costs.

Further readings: The various surveys have been reported and analyzed as follows: The extracts by Queena Lee-Chua came from her article, Do Pinoys read at all? November 27, 2007. Some blogs with additional details are Malikhaing Komiks, in DEVCOMPage, (focusing on educators), in WowPare, The highlights of the 2007 National Readership Survey, from which most of the images above came from, were very kindly provided by the NDSB, and their hard copy version's been scanned and posted online by me: see NDSB Readership Survey 2007 on Flickr. The article The Romantic movement, by reporter Johanna D. Poblete in BusinessWorld, has publishers talking about Romance novels:

"Romances are the bestsellers," Anvil Publishing Inc. assistant general manager and publishing manager Karina A. Bolasco told BusinessWorld at the sidelines of a book launch last February — echoing an article she wrote, "Emerging Trends in Philippine Publishing" (BookWatch, December 2004), wherein she stated that romance novels sell the most number of units next to textbooks. At the time, around 20 romance novel titles were being produced in the country each month, with 20,000 copies per title, generating a monthly gross of P14 million. These days, production is deemed lower, with some publishers diversifying their product line, but insiders still refer to the romance novel as the "backbone" of the publishing industry. Bookware Publishing Corp. alone has a regular target of 12 titles, but releases an average of eight titles, with 12 copies per title, amounting to 96 units in a month (or 96 titles, 144 copies, and 1,152 units per year). Also, they sometimes make reprints, dub-bed "Bestsellers" of their My Special Valentine series, which placed no. 1 (in-house) in terms of sales. Not too shabby, considering that an average of only around 5,000 titles each year (5,518 in 2007, 5,713 in 2006, 5,429 in 2005, and 5,139 in 2004) are issued an ISBN number as monitored by the Philippine National Library. Employees of National Bookstore charged with purchasing books confirmed in an official e-mail to BusinessWorld that "absolutely the romance genre, consistently, has been a significant contributor to the overall sales for Fiction & Literature, both in terms of sales quantity and [revenue] amount." In general, almost half of the sales of locally published titles under Fiction & Literature are either Tagalog romances or chick lit (also referred to as "chic lit") novels by local authors in English. For imported titles, it’s the bestselling sub-category next to general fiction and the literary classics. Notably, local romance novels (both in English and Filipino) sell about five times more in quantity than imported romance novels, but total sales amount is almost equal at National Bookstore.

Here is a 2001 exhaustive survey of the Philippine publishing industry, by the Center for Business and Economic Research and Development of De La Salle University: Printing and Publishing Industry 2001 In 2005, Atty. Dominador Buhain, President of the Philippine Association of Publishers, gave a presentation in Bangkok on Publishing Today (Philippines), which updated some of the information above. Some interesting snippets (rearranged for thematic purposes):

Book sales of both local and foreign titles account for only fifteen (15) to twenty (20) percent of total store sales of National Book Store, the country's largest book retailer which has about eighty (80) stores. nly 15% of the total elementary student population and 45% of the total high school population comprise the private school market. These are the areas where private publishers compete with one another. ...private publishers have developed all basic textbooks for the public elementary and secondary schools and have printed and distributed close to 45 million copies of pupils' texts and teachers' manuals during the last six years. Printruns for the private schools range from 50,000 to 80,000 per title. In both public and private schools, the lifespan of a textbook program is five years--the same edition may be used for five successive years. Next to textbooks, romance paperbacks or pocketbooks are bestsellers in the country. About 20,000 copies per title are sold every month. Each month an average of 20 titles are released. Romance novelettes have won over a large portion of the comics readership.

Philippine Genre Stories, by way of a regional comparison, had an interesting entry in 2008 on bootleg books in Vietnam.

My column tomorrow will be on Robin Hemley's latest Dispatch from Manila, as published in Timothy McSweeny's Internet Tendency. It details the months-long embargo on book importations that resulted from the Bureau of Internal Revenue's discovering it could reinterpret international treaties with impunity, until booksellers, faced with escalating storage costs, cried uncle and surrendered to the BIR by paying the fees it demanded.

This brings up my past entry, What the?? concerning the long-standing problem any booklover's had with our government -which is, its trying to impose tariffs and duties even though the law grants exemptions to the public and others.

In contrast, blogger-turned member of parliament Jeff Ooi, in a recent entry on income taxes in Malaysia, pointed out the Malaysian government makes book and computer purchases tax-deductible.

it may be useful, at this point, to take a look at this report: "14 Food Subsidies in the Philippines: Preliminary Results", by Marito Garcia. See: ppa88ch14.pdf" t