Percentage of Regional Population Who Reads Books

The indicator is created from the Eurobarometer 79.2 survey’s GESIS datafile using regional subsamples. The regional subsamples were recoded to the NUTS 2016 regional boundary definitions with the regions R package. In the larger countries, where only NUTS1 level information was present (for example, in Germany and the United Kingdom), we imputed the NUTS1 territorial average values to the constituent NUTS2 regions.

A ‘dirty averaging’ was used to create regional averages, with scale national post-stratification weights to an expected value of 1. Al respondents who read at least one book in the previous 12 months were coded to have read a book.

This indicator was used in the Balázs Bodó, Dániel Antal, Zoltán Puha: Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia, in Plos ONE (Published: December 3, 2020.)