A recent report on local reading tendencies has revealed the astonishing fact that 88 per cent of Egyptian families do not read in the first place. To members of these families, reading is a process limited to school textbooks. The report prepared by the Cabinet's Information and Decision Support Centre showed that the number of Egyptian families, in which at least one of their members maintains a regular reading habit, is 2.2 million. The report monitored a high readership of religious books accounting for 79 per cent of favoured topics. Next came scientific titles, then literature and, finally, political themes which appealed to 11 per cent only of readers. The prevalent rate of ignorance is surely responsible for the above-mentioned figures. But the fact, which cannot be ignored, is that reading has failed to be part of the every-day activities of the average educated strata of society. In comparison, a recent US study showed that 75 per cent of a polled sample of 300 people said they were ready to give up spending weekends away from home, cut shopping and eating outside but they could not resist buying books. The retreat of reading to the bottom of the Egyptians' list of priorities is attributable to economic conditions and to prevailing entertainment concepts. In Egyptian popular culture, reading is not classified among sources of pleasure, but rather as a seriously dull matter associated with bookworms who are usually looked upon as introverts, haughty and detached from real life. Moreover, the education system, which in no way encourages free reading, has much to do with individuals underestimating the importance of reading. Satellite channels and the Internet are also functioning as alternative knowledge-acquisition media that lure basically young people giving them time only to read their academic textbooks. The report is a wake-up call for the intelligentsia to come up with untraditional ways to attract potential readers other than dull cultural TV programmes and the annual Cairo International Book Fair.
