When Books Become More Expensive, Literacy Is Buried Alongside
Amid various efforts to promote literacy, there is an irony that is often difficult to ignore: books are still treated like ordinary commodities that can be subjected to fiscal burdens without considering their cultural function. Yet a book is not merely merchandise. It is a medium of knowledge, a bridge for education, and one of the most important instruments in building public reasoning. Books give readers the opportunity to pause, think, annotate, revisit, and reflect. So when taxes on books make them increasingly expensive, what is essentially being burdened is not just paper and ink, but also the public’s access to knowledge.
Tax is indeed one of the state’s important instruments for financing public services. No modern country can survive without tax. Roads are built from tax, schools are financed from tax, and health services also depend on it. However, the problem arises when fiscal logic is applied uniformly to all goods without considering their social impact. Furthermore, books actually belong in a different category. They are not an ordinary consumptive need. They are an intellectual need. They play a direct role in shaping the quality of a citizen’s thinking. Therefore, burdening books with high taxes is tantamount to taxing the road to knowledge.
In many discussion forums, we often complain about low reading interest, where children are more familiar with gadgets than books. Teenagers more often read short snippets of information than long texts. Adults are also increasingly less likely to undertake reading that requires patience. Yet at the same time, there is a widening irony: we allow book prices to keep rising. We seem to demand literacy, but without realising it we are making access more difficult. We want a smart society, but we do not always provide an affordable path to achieve it. This is a contradiction that needs to be recognised immediately.
Furthermore, increasingly expensive books drive changes in cultural consumption behaviour. Many people eventually turn to concise content, short videos, or instant summaries because they are considered more practical and cheaper. Yet not all knowledge can be replaced by brief excerpts alone. There are ideas that can only be understood through long-form reading, arguments whose flow needs to be followed, and a depth of thinking that cannot be built from a habit of skimming.
This is where we need to remember that literacy is not just the ability to spell or understand basic texts. Literacy is the ability to think, weigh, and process information critically, and books provide space for that process. When books are turned into luxury goods, access to deep thinking processes also narrows. The public ends up more quickly believing viral information than mature ideas. They are more easily influenced by slogans than explanations. Slowly, society loses its closeness to long-form reading, deep reflection, and the habit of coherent thinking.
High taxes on books produce layered effects. At the most basic level, book prices become more expensive for buyers. For families with limited incomes, a seemingly small price difference can be a major barrier. A book that is useful for school, research, or self-development may go unpurchased because the budget must be shared with other more urgent needs.
In such households, books often lose out not because they are considered unimportant, but because they are too expensive. Literary books, philosophical works, popular science books, and academic books are often the first casualties. Meanwhile, what survives is usually lighter reading.
Furthermore, expensive books create inequality in access to knowledge. Those from affluent families can still buy books, subscribe to digital collections, or visit bookshops freely. But for most of the public, especially students from modest families, books can become a real financial burden. If access to reading is increasingly determined by purchasing power, knowledge will become more concentrated in certain groups, and in the long term, intellectual inequality will widen.
At this point, book tax is no longer merely an economic issue. It gradually becomes a civilisational issue. The quality of a society depends greatly on how easily its citizens can access quality reading material. A strong civilisation is not built by literacy slogans alone, but by policies that allow books to circulate widely in homes, schools, libraries, and community spaces. Without that, literacy will only become beautiful words that lose their real driving force.
Ultimately, we certainly cannot expect a reading culture to grow merely from moral appeals. Reading campaigns, literacy competitions, and the slogan of a thousand books will not be enough if book prices continue to be a barrier. Literacy requires concrete policies such as tax relief, more equitable book distribution, support for public libraries, incentives for local publishers, and subsidy programmes for educational books and quality reading material.
Without such steps, literacy will only move on the surface. Therefore, it is time to review the way we view book taxes. If books are seen as a tax on knowledge, then what is at stake is not merely state revenue figures. What is at stake is the public’s right to learn and develop. A state that is serious about educating its people should not fence off knowledge with excessively high price burdens.
Furthermore, when books are easily affordable, knowledge moves more quickly into classrooms, homes, libraries, and public conversations. But when books become expensive, reading slowly becomes a privilege rather than a right.