With reading rates declining, what was the new report’s main finding, and what does it tell us about the need for everyone across the book chain to work together to encourage reading?
The Reading Promotion Toolkit confirms that the reading crisis among young people is deepening and changing shape. Around 26% of students across OECD countries, including the EU, fail to reach minimum reading proficiency, almost double the EU’s target of below 15% by 2030, and no EU education system improved its primary-level reading performance between PIRLS 2016 and 2021. Just as importantly, the research suggests that the “reading slump” that traditionally hits around the transition to secondary school now appears to start earlier, often when children get their first smartphone, and before reading competences are fully established.
The report’s main finding, however, is that this is not a problem of too little activity. Across all the countries studied, there are policies, campaigns and programmes dedicated to reading, but they are spread across different ministries, levels of government, funding structures and organisations that too often work side by side rather than together. Readers do not emerge by chance: they are shaped by the home, the school, the library, the community and the bookshop, and when one of these is missing or disconnected, children are more likely to disengage. Booksellers occupy a distinctive place in this chain. Free from curricula and assessments, they can put the pleasure of reading first, offer personal recommendations, and welcome children and families who might never set foot in a school or library event.
This is why the report calls for coordinated action across the whole book chain. Publishers can offer diverse, accessible titles that speak to young readers’ lives. Schools and libraries can open the door to books beyond the curriculum. Policymakers can recognise the dual cultural and commercial role of booksellers, include them in the design of reading policies, and invest in their role as literacy mediators. If we are serious about rebuilding a culture of reading, every part of the ecosystem has to be involved, and the bookshop should not be the missing piece.
The report finds that booksellers need shorter, more visual, easier-to-read, dyslexia-friendly and bilingual titles for 9-15 year olds, and that these formats can be entry points to wider reading, especially for boys. How do we make sure these entry points lead onward to more demanding reading?
Children and young adults are more likely to read when books feel relevant to their lives and reflect their interests, which is particularly important for young reluctant readers. Nowadays, school curricula rely heavily on the same canonical texts, which often fail to engage or inspire because they do not reflect students’ lives. Providing more accessible formats (such as visual, dyslexia-friendly, shorter, or bilingual titles) helps young readers ease into the practice of reading and eventually use it as a stepping stone to more demanding literature.
Firstly, accessible entry points such as graphic novels, manga, and short illustrated titles help reduce anxiety and transform reading into an enjoyable habit. The key to progressing toward more complex texts lies in identifying the specific themes, tropes, and genres a young reader connects with—such as action, gaming, sports, fantasy, or romance. Secondly, booksellers can guide young readers to transition to titles that share similar elements, such as moving from comics to illustrated prose, or from fast-paced young adult series to denser fantasy series and longer works. For boys, who face higher rates of secondary school disengagement, maintaining a diverse range of relatable entry points and flexibility in genres that match their personal hobbies is essential.
Ultimately, encouraging children and young readers to take up or continue reading means keeping the experience pressure-free while validating the reader’s choices. This ensures that accessible formats—such as graphic novels, fantasy and romance novels, and manga—serve not as endpoints, but as pathways toward deeper literacy.
What can the success of culture vouchers teach publishers about reaching new readers?
Culture vouchers are state-funded initiatives aiming to introduce young people to cultural activities while providing support to the cultural and creative industries. The vouchers, which have a fixed value, can be spent exclusively on cultural goods and activities in cinemas, theatres, music venues, but also in bookshops. This mechanism is intended to lower financial barriers to cultural participation while encouraging young people to engage in cultural activities they might otherwise have limited contact with.
In countries where culture voucher programmes have been implemented over the past few years, an increase in the number of young people reading for pleasure, rather than only for educational purposes, has been observed. Down the line, the vouchers are an important tool for fostering readers who will continue reading for pleasure throughout their lives. For publishers, this demonstrates the importance of reaching young people early on, lowering the barriers to discovering books and creating opportunities for them to develop a personal relationship with reading regardless of different socioeconomic backgrounds.
If BookTok drives demand but concentrates attention on a few titles, what is the role of booksellers, and of publishers?
BookTok has proven to be a powerful tool for book discoverability: book influencers and viral trends have propelled books to the forefront of many algorithms, capturing new readers as well as bolstering the passion of existing ones. The very nature of BookTok as a separate section of the platform makes it a community, harnessing the power of books to create proximity, dialogue and participation, with books serving as a fundamental vector for this.
While any renewed attention and focus on books is welcome, the BookTok phenomenon also presents challenges, such as the reliance on the algorithm to push certain books. Indeed, the very functioning of the algorithm rests on personalization, engagement, and content that captures attention quickly and resonates with users on the platforms. As such, content that reflects the preference of the majority, so to speak, is prioritised and boosted, which can then in turn lead to a reduced variation in what stories and perspectives are actually proposed.
This is not just an issue when it comes to the concentration of attention on few titles, but also to the systematic clouding of communities that are already marginalised and underrepresented, such as BIPOC and queer ones. Publishers and booksellers, however, can counteract this by acting as bridges between what is already presented and what can be presented to the wider audience for the first time, identifying the elements of books which are trending and then perhaps finding less known ones with similar fils rouges, thus contributing to the growth of engagement while also uplifting and spotlighting the stories that typically do not benefit from the conventional platform dynamics.
How can publishing associations work with booksellers so reading policy supports the whole book chain?
Reading policy is often designed around a single actor, whether the school, the library or the publisher, while a reader’s path runs through the whole book chain. When policy captures only one link, the rest of the chain is left to carry the cost of the effort.
The most durable projects are those that bring booksellers, publishers and public institutions around the same table from the start, turning reading promotion into a shared responsibility of the whole ecosystem rather than the initiative of one actor. This is also what makes them credible to funders, who can see a project that reaches young readers at every stage of their path.
Publishing and bookselling associations are well placed to build on this logic. By speaking with one voice, they can show policymakers that supporting reading means supporting a whole chain: school libraries that buy from local booksellers, author visits financed by publishers, and shops that act as meeting places for young readers. By documenting what their joint projects achieve and whom they reach, they also give public authorities the evidence needed to fund them over the long term, and ensure that the measures adopted benefit every link of the chain rather than only one.