Digital natives’ zest for reading, attitude to reading in light of the surveys of 2017 and 2019

Abstract

Even though they show interesting data not only for experts, representative reading surveys are not conducted frequently in Hungary. There is a very literal reason for that: a research like this requires significant resources. That is why the fact that we could do a research like that twice during the past three years is of vital importance and for other reasons as well. Our aim with our study was not to present the results of the last survey in as many details as possible or to analyse them. We wanted to take a closer look at a special field. We highlighted those data of the research which could or can support the assumption that the
children of the digital era read different things in a different way. First of all we describe the cluster with the help of research literature resources, which are characterised later by the data of the survey as well. As 3-5 years meant serious differences between the age groups during the past twenty–twenty-five years, we could rely only on up-to-date sources, mainly the ones after 2010. After the theoretical background we describe briefly the most important parameters of the research conducted within the framework of the application of the Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library, then we analyse the data gained here. (Several times we compare the data to earlier ones of the same project, or to surveys done and presented by others.) As we wanted not only to share the results of a representative research, we present two characteristically 21st century „phenomena” as well: the operation, the appearance of online communities of book lovers and of fanfiction appearing mainly online in the culture of our everyday life.