We're Losing Readers and It's Going to Take More Than a Book to Win Them Back

The National Literacy Trust (NLT) published its annual survey of children and young people's reading habits earlier this year, and if you work in publishing and you haven't read it, go and find it now. In 2025, just 1 in 3 children between the ages of 8 and 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time, the lowest figure recorded in the twenty years the survey has been running, representing a 36% decline since it started. Fewer than 1 in 5 of that same age group read something daily, also a record low, and even among 5 to 8 year olds, daily reading has dropped by more than 9% since 2019.

It's a trend, one that is more than a blip or a single bad year, and it's been heading in the wrong direction for two decades, which means that whatever the publishing industry has been doing to reverse it clearly hasn't worked.

When faced with declining readership, publishing's default is to look at the product: better covers, more diverse stories, books that feel relevant to young readers' lives, which are all important and not wrong, but they're not sufficient on their own because the problem isn't just about what's being published, it's about the entire ecosystem around reading, and that ecosystem is under pressure from multiple directions simultaneously.

Screen time is the obvious one, and it's real, but it's also more complicated than the simple narrative of smartphones eating books. The NLT data shows that children who don't enjoy reading still choose to engage with song lyrics, news articles, fan fiction and comics in their free time, which means the appetite for words and stories hasn't disappeared, it's just found different formats. Bridging that gap isn't something a publisher, a school or a library can do alone.

What consistently makes the difference is when multiple things happen at once: a teacher who reads aloud, a library that feels welcoming and accessible, a community bookshop that runs events, a parent or volunteer who reads with them at home, and access to material that genuinely reflects their interests and their world. When those things converge, the data shows better outcomes, and when they don't, all the well-intentioned individual effort in the world tends to disappear into the gap.

The publishing industry's long-term health depends entirely on people who grow up believing that reading is something they do because they want to, not because they're told to. Every child who leaves primary school having decided that books aren't for them is a reader the industry is unlikely to win back, and the current trajectory suggests there are a great many of those children.

The AI conversation in publishing is moving fast, and it should be, but it needs to sit alongside this one, because the most sophisticated content ecosystem in the world is considerably less valuable if the audience it's designed for has already decided reading isn't part of their life. Technology can personalise, distribute and create formats that meet readers where they are, but it can't manufacture the habit of reading in a child who's never been given the conditions to fall in love with it.

That requires people, places and sustained investment. It requires publishers, bookshops, libraries, schools, charities and businesses to see themselves as part of the same project rather than operating in parallel. It requires the conversation about the future of reading to happen alongside the conversation about the future of publishing, not separately from it.

The reading crisis is real, the data's been clear for twenty years, and the solution is collective. I don’t think that’s a complicated conclusion, it would just be great now if the industry would act on it at the scale it requires.