The Danish government has announced it will abolish a 25% sales tax on books, in an effort to combat a “reading crisis”.<\/p>\n
The tax is is one of the highest in the world. Culture Minister Jacob Engel-Schmidt says he hopes scrapping it will lead to more books flying off the shelves.<\/p>\n
The measure is expected to cost about 330 million kroner ($50m, \u00a338m) a year.<\/p>\n
Data from the OECD, an intergovernmental think tank, shows that a quarter of Danish 15-year-olds cannot understand a simple text.<\/p>\n
“The reading crisis has unfortunately been spreading in recent years,” said Engel-Schmidt. He added that he was “incredibly proud” of the move to scrap the tax. <\/p>\n
He said “massive money should be spent on investing in the consumption and culture” of the Danish people. <\/p>\n
In Finland, Sweden and Norway – which also have a standard Value Added Tax (VAT) of 25% like Denmark – the VAT on books is 14%, 6% and 0% respectively. In the UK, books are also VAT-free.<\/p>\n
Surveys have shown declining levels of reading and comprehension among Danish teenagers, said Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, vice-chair of the government’s working group on literature.<\/p>\n
Younger children can easily improve their reading skills “but at 15 the ability to understand a text is pretty important”, he told the BBC. <\/p>\n
The numbers were “pretty shocking,” he said, referring to the OECD research. <\/p>\n
Young people struggle with reading because they have “so many options” and can be “easily distracted”.<\/p>\n
He said removing VAT on books was not a complete solution, but it would make books “more accessible”.<\/p>\n
The government’s working group on literature also looked into ways to export Danish literature, the digitalisation of the book market and the impact on authors’ pay. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Danish government has announced it will abolish a 25% sales tax on books, in an effort to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-22205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}