Saturday, November 26, 2011

Hindustan Times' survey of children's reading in India (excerpt)

What the kids are reading

Reading habits, researchers point out, are hard to map .... So we came up with a survey to get a sense of what urban children aged 3-12 in India’s metros are reading and the role parents are playing in shaping the habit.

The findings are interesting. For instance, 35% children spend an average of 3-5 hours on non-school related reading in a week, 77% parents said their kids read their first book at age 4 or before while 74% parents encourage their kids to read by getting them books home and 14% do so by reading out aloud to them.

According to the survey, while most kids – 72% – have read the authors (Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl, Tintin etc) that their parents did, it’s the contemporary foreign titles of Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Diary of a Wimpy Kid series that are topping their lists. In terms of genre, the survey threw up comics as the most popular (25%) followed by adventure (20%), fairy-tales (18%) and sci-fi (16%).

Tintin goes HINDI
Comic character Tintin seems to be one of India’s hot favourites, scoring an 18% among books regularly read in the survey, while the animation released earlier this month has become the animated film with the highest opening in India. Sony Pictures India, in fact, brought Spielberg’s animation to India even before its US release.

Given that close to half of India’s population is on the younger side, it’s a good time to be in children’s publishing in India.

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