You've received several answers on the "quality" side due to books being harder to create, but I'll cover two more arguments:

1. Nobody's "reading the internet" anymore, especially not on their phones. They're mindlessly scrolling short-form video, either muted or blasting them really loud with no headphones, if my experience of Spanish subway is accurate.

2. Even if all books were just printed directly from random internet pages, and there was zero difference in quality, it would be a huge step-up to go from reading one internet page at a time, to focusing on the same content for 200+ pages in a row. There is huge value in giving ourselves the longer attention span.

Myself I have an e-ink reader but almost always take a paper book on the subway. It's still better quality print, not fragile in any way that matters, and I don't have to think about charge or aging electronics. I only bring the e-reader for manuals and such that change too often to be worth the paper cost, but still miss the old coding manuals with their ad-hoc page sizes, the spatial sense of where the information was in a book was part of the memory anchoring.

It's not all that odd to me. The barrier of entry to getting something printed and published is much, much, higher than putting something online, which effects the quality quite a bit.

Obviously there are complete wastes of paper out there in terms of published books, but as a generalisation it's not odd to presume a printed book is going to be of higher quality than a webpage.

Even low-quality books have words people might not know. I often find people who don't read books (physical or eBook) have a much lower vocabulary, and they typically don't value vocabulary, which as an avid reader, I find weird, but I guess to each their own.

That's a weird take. The internet has basically no barriers. Book publishing, with all of its many flaws, does. Anyone can technically self publish a book, but the odds that you'll find someone on the subway reading it are small. So odds are the book you see people reading on transit is on average better than an internet content.

Outside of that, I don't think we should gatekeep it too much though - the biggest benefits come from reading anything at all.

In Spain? Never heard of that, and would not make sense. An italian author writting about politics in Florence?

I dunno. There's something to be said for having the focus to sit down and read through a book. It suggests someone is a little more comfortable with their own thoughts and doesn't succumb to constant tech distractions. Which in turn suggests an ability to think more clearly and less emotively about politics.

I've thought about this. I agree with you not all reading is equal, and reading social posts (including HN) is the equivalent of junk food, but there's something about reading that sets it apart. I think it's like exercising. Reading engages parts of the mind not exercised otherwise, it requires a more active imagination, it often involves "adult" mechanisms like delayed gratification that are less present in other forms of communication. It's more active and less frictionless than many internet activities, watching TV, etc. That's why it's sometimes a struggle to find a moment to read, and why young people often don't do it: it requires more effort than competing activities (this struggle also applies to physical activity, of course!). And this effort does something positive to your brain, I think. I'd say given two forms of trash entertainment, one trashy literature, and the other a trashy TV show, the former is better for you than the latter.

Just in case anyone wants to debate this, I am NOT saying watching TV is completely frictionless or requires no imagination at all, and of course there's a lot of variance in which specific show or movie. I'm only arguing in relative terms.

From https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...

Readership issues in countries like the USA started way before mass adoption of AI, so also it's not related to AI effects.

https://institutoautor.org/espana-se-publican-los-datos-del-...

https://www.rtve.es/noticias/20260611/ventas-libros-siguen-a...

The rest is not right, the word counts in particular is just a reflection of why counting words in a language is hard:

93k comes from the number headwords listed in the core RAE dictionary. The RAE's dictionary of Americanism adds another 70k entries. When you include historical and technical terminology, more comprehensive dictionaries will have well over 300k words.

Counting "over a million" from English comes from way, way more inclusive counting methods that throw in technical jargon, acronyms, global slang, etc. The OED, which would compare to the RAE dictionary numbers, lists only 171k words.

Beyond this, counting is complicated by the fact that compounding and morphological changes work differently, English will use different words in cases where Spanish would use suffixes, and will count compounds as words that in Spanish would be phrases.

"there's only a few ways to express yourself in Spanish compared to other languages." is very wrong. Spanish word order is massively more flexible than English, grammar and morphology more nuanced, they do things in different ways but this is a deep misunderstanding.

The only way to get to a million English words is to start counting things that nobody considers separate, or even real words. Even if you were to use a real dictionary word count (a quick search tells me Merriam-Webster unabridged more than cuts your number in half), I'd wonder if they're counting eg "see" and "seen" as one or two words.

(Similarly, 93k comes from RAE, which is intentionally conservative. Just pulling in regional words gets you a few more tens of thousands.

Anyway, just a wild thing to read.

Apart from that, the dictionary only list root words, not derivatives.

I'm with you on almost everything else, but the fact that it is such an unwieldy, awkward language means that a ton of communication is by idiom (that just has to be memorized, that's where a lot of the "vocabulary" is), and an enormous amount is allowed to be assumed and left unsaid (aggressively "pro-drop.") Also, the fact that sentence word order is just conventional in Spanish as opposed to strict like Germanic languages or French means that you can do whatever you want with it with the same literal meaning but giving a different connotative impression. Spanish is a great language for poetry but a bad language for communication. Extremely expressive, but not as expressive through the means of vocabulary choices.

The fact that in English you can't just move the words around for emphasis or association means that we need more words, but the fact that our words aren't mutating a fraction as much in order to indicate their function, instead using position, means that any sound put into a particular position will serve that position's function. You can just quack like a duck for the verb, and let people figure out what that noise means the subject is doing. If ducks used the Roman alphabet, English would also just accept the duck spelling without changing it, and use the fact that you don't know how duck words are pronounced as a class marker.

But I think (native English-speaking) people vastly underestimate how difficult English is to read and write. Spanish is easy to read, and almost as easy to write. If you spell a word wrong in Spanish, it probably means that you're also saying it wrong. If Spanish is a 2 in reading difficulty and Chinese characters are an 8, English is probably a 6.

I think the people here denying that Spanish is a small language and that English is an absurdly large language are being guided by the "Law of Averages." Languages being smaller or larger isn't an indication of virtue or grace. It makes literacy a nightmare and is used to discriminate by class and region. English has an excessive number of words that duplicate each other, and as a result (and as a German) so many (and a variable number of by region) vowels that a phonetic written English is a pipedream.

English and Spanish have different grammatical and sound characteristics that allow English to take on new vocabulary casually, and allow Spanish to have a vocabulary largely circumscribed by the RAE (w the Mexican supplements [edit: and the unwritten Chilean one.]) Those characteristics also mean that you could teach an adult Spanish illiterate to read well in a month, and for an adult English illiterate it will take years. English (and French, and Portuguese, and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) are horrible languages for reading and writing.

If say English number bigger than Spanish number, no need get mad.