Stop blaming the reader

By Noel Galon de Leon

I found the article The Biggest Crisis in Philippine Literature Isn’t Translation. It’s Readers compelling because it asks a question that the Philippine literary community often avoids: who actually reads the literature we produce? Its shift from translation, international publishing, foreign rights, and global recognition toward readership is necessary. But I am not entirely convinced by the article’s central framing. For me, calling the crisis a “reader problem” risks making the reader responsible for a failure that is much larger than individual reading habits. The shortage of readers, assuming that there is indeed a shortage, cannot be separated from the cultural, economic, educational, institutional, and geographic conditions that determine who gets access to books in the first place. I agree that readers are essential to literature, but I would hesitate to blame the absence of a strong reading culture on readers themselves.

The question I would rather ask is not simply, “Why are Filipinos not reading?” but “What conditions have we created for Filipinos to become readers?” This distinction is important because reading is never purely an individual act. We often speak about reading as if it were a matter of personal discipline, attention span, or interest, but the ability to sustain a reading practice is deeply shaped by material circumstances. A person needs access to books, affordable editions, libraries, bookstores, schools, teachers, time, physical space, and communities that value reading. These conditions are not equally distributed. A reader in Metro Manila may have access to dozens of bookstores, literary events, universities, independent publishers, and libraries, while a reader in a provincial community may have very different options. To reduce this disparity to a lack of interest is to misunderstand how readership is produced.

This is where I think the article needs a more structural vocabulary. I would move the conversation from the “reader problem” to the literary infrastructure problem. By literary infrastructure, I mean the entire network through which books are produced, financed, edited, published, distributed, sold, taught, reviewed, archived, translated, and read. Readers exist within this infrastructure. They do not simply appear because we tell them that literature is important. Schools produce certain kinds of readers. Publishers determine which manuscripts become books. Bookstores determine which books become visible. Libraries determine which books remain accessible after their commercial life ends. Cultural institutions determine which writers and traditions receive support. The market determines what can survive economically. These structures collectively shape the reading public.

I am especially interested in the article’s claim that reading has become a luxury. I think this is true, but perhaps not in the way the article initially suggests. Reading becomes a luxury not simply because people are distracted by technology or because books are expensive. It becomes a luxury because time, access, cultural capital, and economic security are themselves unequally distributed. For someone working multiple jobs, commuting for several hours, caring for a family, or simply trying to survive economically, sustained literary reading may not be an easily available activity. The issue is therefore not only whether someone wants to read. It is whether that person has the social and material conditions necessary to read. This is why the discourse of “cultivating readers” can become problematic when it ignores the unequal distribution of the resources required to cultivate them.

There is also a class dimension to the way we talk about readers. When we imagine the ideal reader, we often unconsciously imagine someone who can purchase books regularly, visit bookstores, attend literary festivals, study literature formally, follow literary journals, and participate in intellectual communities. But this is only one kind of reader. There are readers who borrow books, share books, download texts, read photocopies, use public libraries, encounter literature through classrooms, or discover writers through social media. There are readers whose literary engagement happens in languages other than English or Filipino. There are readers who may never identify themselves as part of the “literary community” but who nevertheless read deeply. If our definition of readership is too narrow, we may end up diagnosing a reading crisis that is partly produced by our own limited understanding of who counts as a reader.

This becomes even more complicated when we talk about Philippine literature across languages and regions. The Philippines does not have a single literary public. We have multiple linguistic communities with their own traditions, histories, readerships, publishing practices, and literary institutions. A Hiligaynon reader, an Akeanon reader, a Kinaray-a reader, a Cebuano reader, a Waray reader, an Ilokano reader, and a Filipino or English reader may inhabit overlapping but very different literary worlds. When we say “Filipino readers,” we need to be careful about whose reading practices we are actually describing. The national literary market has historically been highly centralized, and this centralization affects not only what gets published but also what becomes visible as Philippine literature. A reading crisis may therefore also be a problem of linguistic and geographic fragmentation created by unequal systems of circulation.

This is why I am cautious about treating translation as something that should simply be displaced by readership. Translation and readership are not opposing priorities. They are interconnected. Translation can create readers, not merely serve readers who already exist. A Kinaray-a novel translated into Filipino can reach a reader who would otherwise never encounter it. A Hiligaynon poem translated into English can enter a classroom, an anthology, or an international literary conversation. A regional story translated into another Philippine language can cross an internal cultural border that may be just as significant as an international one. Translation can therefore function as a form of literary infrastructure. The more interesting question is not whether we should choose between translation and readers, but what kinds of translation create new relationships among readers, languages, regions, and literary traditions.

I also think we need to question our obsession with international recognition without dismissing its importance. Foreign publishers, translation grants, international book fairs, rights sales, and global literary networks can provide Filipino writers and publishers with opportunities that would otherwise be difficult to access. The problem begins when international visibility becomes the primary measure of literary success. A book can be translated into several languages and still remain inaccessible to the community that produced it. A writer can receive international recognition while the literary language they write in remains marginalized within the country. We should therefore ask whether the global circulation of Philippine literature is accompanied by stronger domestic circulation. It is possible to export literature successfully while failing to build the infrastructure necessary for Filipinos to encounter one another’s literature at home.

This question becomes particularly urgent for regional publishing. As someone who has worked closely with books, writers, literary communities, and publishing outside the dominant centers, I find the idea of simply “creating readers” insufficient. Regional publishers often confront problems that cannot be solved by reader enthusiasm alone. Distribution is difficult. Bookstores are unevenly located. Shipping costs matter. Marketing budgets are limited. Institutional procurement can be unpredictable. Libraries may have limited acquisition budgets. Regional languages may have smaller commercial markets. Even when a book is excellent, there is no guarantee that it will reach the reader who needs or wants it. The problem is therefore not simply whether people want to read. Sometimes the book and the reader are separated by an entire infrastructure of economic and geographic barriers.

This also forces us to confront the politics of cultural value. Who decides which books deserve to circulate? Who decides which authors are important enough to teach? Which languages receive translation funding? Which books are reviewed? Which publishers are invited to major literary events? Which writers are included in national anthologies? Which regional traditions become representative of “Philippine literature”? These questions are not merely administrative. They involve power. Literary culture is produced through processes of selection, recognition, institutional endorsement, and exclusion. When certain books become visible while others remain obscure, this is not always because one book is objectively better than another. Often, visibility is connected to networks of institutions, capital, language, geography, and cultural legitimacy.

For this reason, I would also resist the idea that the reader is simply the final destination of publishing. The reader is part of the production of literary meaning, but the reader is also shaped by the publishing system. What people read depends partly on what is available to them. Availability influences familiarity. Familiarity influences interest. Interest influences readership. Readership then influences publishing decisions. This creates a cycle. If publishers consistently produce what they believe the market already wants, readers may have fewer opportunities to encounter unfamiliar genres, languages, forms, and perspectives. We therefore need to think beyond the simplistic relationship between supply and demand. Literature can also expand the imagination of the market by introducing readers to books they did not know they wanted.

I particularly appreciate the article’s argument that writers should not necessarily flatten the specificity of their stories in order to make them universally accessible. I strongly agree with this. The idea that literature must become culturally generic before it can travel internationally is deeply limiting. Regional specificity can be a source of literary power. A particular landscape, language, ritual, memory, food, history, or community can create the very details through which readers from elsewhere begin to recognize something human and shared. But this principle should not become an excuse to ignore the work of mediation. Specificity can invite readers into unfamiliar worlds, but access to those worlds may still require translation, contextualization, teaching, editorial framing, and cultural exchange. Trusting readers does not mean abandoning readers. It means respecting their capacity to encounter difference while also building the structures that allow that encounter to happen.

I think the article opens a much more important debate than the question of whether Filipinos read enough. The real issue is what kind of literary culture we are building and for whom we are building it. Are we building a literary culture primarily for those who already possess the economic resources, educational background, geographic proximity, and cultural capital to participate? Or are we building one that actively expands access across class, region, language, age, and community? If we genuinely want more readers, then readership development cannot be reduced to campaigns encouraging people to read. It has to involve libraries, schools, publishers, bookstores, local governments, universities, cultural agencies, teachers, writers, translators, and communities working together to create a sustainable reading infrastructure.

So, I agree with the article that readers matter. They matter enormously. But I would push the argument further and say that the reader should not be treated as the crisis. The deeper crisis is the system that determines whether a person has the opportunity to become a reader at all. Before we ask where the readers are, we should ask where the books are, who can afford them, who can access them, which languages they are written in, where they circulate, who teaches them, who preserves them, and who has the cultural authority to declare them valuable. Before we say that we need to “create readers,” we should examine the structures that create, enable, exclude, and regulate readership. The provocative question, then, is no longer “Why are Filipinos not reading?” It is “What kind of literary system have we built that makes reading easier for some and harder for others?” That, to me, is the more uncomfortable question, and perhaps the more necessary one.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.