Will tax cuts create more readers?
Denmark proposes ending VAT on books
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Denmark is proposing an end to VAT on books, currently levied at 25%.
Other Nordic countries also charge a standard rate of 25% VAT, but it does not apply to books. VAT on books in Finland is 14%, in Sweden 6% and in Norway zero.
Sweden reduced its VAT on books in 2001, resulting in a rise in book sales, but analysis found they were bought by existing readers.
“It is also about getting literature out there,” said Engel-Schmidt. “That is why we have already allocated money for strengthened cooperation between the country’s public libraries and schools, so that more children can be introduced to good literature.”
A total of 8.3m books were sold in shops and online in Denmark in 2023, according to the national statistics office. The country’s population is just over 6 million.
I am all in favour of tax cuts but what about the rest of the budget? (I think that, in the UK at least, we ought to add VAT to books and other “printed matter”, as well as food, and children’s clothes; this expansion of the base would allow the rate to be cut massively, perhaps down to 5% across the board, leaving both consumers and the government net better off, with money for public services; also, do remember that VAT is regressive, so lowering the rate across the board is a progressive policy).
Anyway, the question is: will this really result in much more reading? I don’t know whether I believe that one quarter of their fifteen-year-olds cannot understand simple texts, but this isn’t the policy that comes to mind.
More books will be sold, but as with Sweden, I think it will be among existing readers. Netflix is the real enemy. My children go everywhere with a book. Almost every other child I see is holding a phone or pad. Always. Two weeks ago, I walked past a couple outside a pub. Their very young child was sitting up in the buggy while they had a glass of wine. The girl was fine. She was watching the street and the trees. But the mother was waving Peppa Pig on her phone in front of the child. One girl I walked past recently almost fell out of the car because she was watching her pad. On the plane over here, the number of people I saw reading was maybe single figures. It was all movies and phones. VAT cuts won’t do much about that.
well, I read books on my iPad! I need more light and less weight than a physical book can provide.
This is an interesting discussion. On a more general level, my impression is that political proposals of this kind tend to frame cultural problems as social problems and reduce social problems to financial ones: to encourage reading, it should be made more affordable. However, books are easily accessible at low cost: in libraries, public bookcases, as gifts, secondhand, and, if the copyright has expired, for free online. So the problem isn't a „social“ one in the sense of a high economic barrier to entry, but a cultural one in the sense of an environment conducive to reading and an upbringing strong enough to resist the ubiquitous preference for digital devices. But that's not something politicians could simply achieve with popular measures; it requires much more.