When Denmark’s Culture Minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt admitted that his country was facing a “reading crisis,” it was an unusual confession for a nation that routinely ranks among the most literate in the world.
Yet the acknowledgement carried weight: reading habits are declining across generations, and the Danish government’s response was swift and targeted—books will soon be exempt from sales tax.
The reasoning is straightforward: if books are expensive, fewer people buy them; if they are cheaper, reading might once again find its place at the heart of public life.
The contrast with Pakistan could not be sharper. While Denmark takes proactive fiscal steps to encourage reading, Pakistan continues to mire its literary culture in systemic neglect.
Books in Pakistan are not only inaccessible to large swathes of the population, but they are also priced exorbitantly when compared with neighbouring countries.
In a country already struggling with one of the weakest reading cultures in the region, this pricing disparity amounts to a deliberate strangulation of intellectual life.
Vanishing reading culture
The decline in book reading is a global phenomenon. Digital media, algorithm-driven content, and addictive screen time have displaced the slow, deliberate engagement of reading with the fast consumption of memes, videos, and posts.
Yet while the crisis is global, the stakes differ drastically from one country to another.
In Denmark, high literacy rates and a strong tradition of libraries, publishing houses, and cultural programmes provide at least a sturdy foundation.
Pakistan has no such advantage. With education indicators lagging, a curriculum dominated by rote memorisation, and an overall societal disinterest in intellectual pursuits, reading in Pakistan is already an endangered activity.
The additional financial barriers, therefore, become not merely an inconvenience but a near-fatal blow.
The paradox of tax exemption
At first glance, Pakistan’s official stance on book pricing might seem reasonable: books are exempt from sales tax. But the picture changes dramatically when one considers the associated costs of printing.
Printing services are taxed, local publishers depend heavily on paper that is not shielded from market volatility, and government policy does little to stabilise these inputs.
The result is predictable: the cost of producing books rises uncontrollably, and publishers, squeezed by thin margins, pass these costs directly to the reader.
The outcome is paradoxical. A book may not be taxed as an item, but the infrastructure that makes it possible—the presses, the paper, the ink—remains burdened by financial levies and market shocks. The reader ultimately pays the price for this skewed policy framework.
Books priced out of reach
The disparity between Pakistan’s book prices and those of its neighbours illustrates the extent of the crisis.
Across a wide selection of titles, prices in Pakistan are routinely twice as high as in India and Bangladesh, even after adjusting for currency exchange rates.
For certain international titles, the difference is even more striking—Pakistanis pay up to four times the price of the same book available in Dhaka.
This disparity cannot be explained away by transport or import costs. It reflects systemic failure: a publishing ecosystem left vulnerable to inflationary pressures without state support, a taxation system that burdens essential services, and a lack of coherent cultural policy that values reading as a national good.
In such a context, the question is not why Pakistanis do not read more. The question is how anyone manages to read at all.
Beyond luxury: Reading as a necessity
In many developing societies, books are seen as luxuries rather than necessities. In Pakistan, this perception has hardened into policy.
Government after government has failed to treat books as essential cultural goods.
While the state subsidises fuel, energy, or even select consumer products to maintain political capital, the idea of subsidising reading materials or stabilising publishing costs rarely enters the conversation.
This neglect ignores an obvious truth: reading is not a pastime for the privileged. It is the backbone of intellectual life in any society.
A nation that prices books beyond the reach of its citizens effectively signals its indifference to critical thinking, to creative imagination, and to cultural continuity.
The cost barrier ensures that reading remains confined to a narrow elite, while the majority remain excluded from any meaningful access to ideas.
Global shifts, local blindness
The crisis in Pakistan appears even more stark when measured against global trends.
Countries that already enjoy strong reading cultures are taking further steps to secure their literary futures.
Denmark is not alone. Governments across Europe are experimenting with wood-free paper alternatives, building publicly accessible libraries, and devising programs to keep younger generations engaged with books.
In these countries, the decline of reading is treated as a national concern, meriting fiscal intervention and cultural innovation.
Pakistan, on the other hand, continues to operate in policy blindness. There is little acknowledgement of the problem, let alone any attempt to confront it.
Even as global inflation raises the price of paper, even as digital platforms devour the attention of young people, even as publishers warn of collapsing demand, the Pakistani state responds with silence.
Social costs of neglect
The cost of books in Pakistan cannot be measured in rupees alone. It reflects a deeper social and cultural erosion.
A society that cannot make books affordable condemns itself to intellectual stagnation. Without access to reading, generations grow up alien to the slow discipline of thought, deprived of the ability to question, analyse, or imagine.
In such a vacuum, the rote learning that dominates Pakistan’s education system thrives unchecked.
Without a culture of voluntary reading to counterbalance it, rote education ensures that students are trained to memorise rather than think, to reproduce rather than create.
The barriers to book access thus reinforce a cycle of intellectual impoverishment.
A tale of two realities
Denmark’s decision to abolish sales tax on books may or may not reverse its reading crisis, but it signals seriousness. It communicates that the state values reading as a civic duty, not merely as a private leisure.
Pakistan, by contrast, communicates the opposite: that books are dispensable, that intellectual life is secondary, and that cultural policy is an afterthought.
The result is two starkly different realities. In Denmark, a literate society fears losing the habit of reading and responds with structural reform, while in Pakistan, where the habit was already weak, the state allows financial and policy barriers to crush it altogether.
Unravelling of intellectual futures
The danger for Pakistan is not only that fewer people will read books. The deeper danger lies in the kind of society that emerges from this neglect.
A nation without readers is a nation without critics, without innovators, without dreamers. It becomes a society content with shallow consumption, unable to challenge itself or engage with the complexities of a changing world. Books are not mere commodities, and their price cannot be measured solely in terms of cost. They are the carriers of ideas, the repositories of memory, and the engines of imagination. By allowing books to become unaffordable, Pakistan has effectively devalued its own intellectual future.
