Ukrainian readers are switching to digital content

Among Ukrainian readers 31% use e-books and another 17% listen to audio-books. That is one of the findings of a study carried out across the whole of Ukraine and titled “Ukrainian Reading Publishing Data 2018”. The study was published by the Chytomo cultural and publishing project in conjunction with the GUTENBERGZ digital publishing house and in co-operation with the Razumkov Centre sociological service.

The share of those who use electronic books has more than doubled: in 2014 only 13% of Ukrainians read books in electronic format, and only 1% of those who were surveyed actually paid for this pleasure.

Among those who read e-books, 92% say they downloaded those for free. 8% sometimes bought electronic and audio-books on dedicated websites, and even fewer Ukrainians (only 3%) use online subscriptions.

The greatest demand is for electronic products from Apple / Google music, Bookmate and Megogo.net.

We should point out that 37.1% of the respondents said they had not read a single book during the last 12 months.

The full text of the study is available here.

The research was conducted with the support of the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.

The study was conducted by the Razumkov Centre sociological service between 26 October and 1 November 2018 in all regions of Ukraine except the Crimea peninsula and the occupied territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. 2,013 respondents aged 15-59 years old were interviewed. The theoretical sampling error is 2.3%.