(This is part of my explorations of PORDATA – A Portuguese open data database)

This plot really really surprised me:

It shows the permilage of people in Portugal who are library users. Checkout that 2003’s number. An astonishing 82.6% of the population was going to libraries! This sounds too much to me. I don’t think I know anyone who goes to libraries. But I guess that 2020 is a really different world than 2003.

For sanity check, I’ve tried to find numbers for other countries.

From a survey in the UK:

Users are decreasing, but still pretty high numbers at 2015/2016 - more than one third of the population is a library user.

And here we have data given to us in a press release by the Spanish Statistics Institute.

So, yeah, TIL: more people use libraries than I though.