Why Romanians don't read

The Brussels correspondent for the daily România Liberă tells of the visit of a Croatian journalist in Bucharest who wondered why so few Romanians read in public: "I tried to justify the behaviour of my countrymen with the preposterous book prices. A book costs as much in Romania as in France, but  salaries are five times lower here so that buying a book represents a major investment. In Romania books are either something for the beach or they have the status of a Bible. ... When my friend asked about newspaper circulations and I gave him some figures he thought I was making them up. He couldn't believe that in a country with 22 million inhabitants the serious newspapers rarely sell more than 50,000 copies, while his newspaper in Croatia, with a population of four million, has a circulation of more than 100,000. And they certainly sell even more than that, because the cafés buy the papers too, and display them at the entrance so that customers can come in and read in peace."

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