The decline in reading for pleasure among children and adolescents points to the sun setting on this once highly valued pastime. However, it’s not a complex problem. This decline is directly correlated with the increase in technology use, as it has become increasingly accessible to children and increasingly so at younger ages. Today, we see children as young as three glued to iPad screens. This prompts us to rethink our traditional definitions of reading, as it is no longer adequate to view reading as solely engagement with a tangible book.

At this year’s IPG autumn conference, I sat in on Liz Cross’s panel: ‘The Joy of Reading’. Liz Cross is the publishing director of David Fickling Books, an independent children’s books publisher. She spoke about this problem, responding to statistics from the National Literacy Trust, which reveal that only 1 in 3 (32.7%) people aged 8 to 18 say they enjoy reading, and only 1 in 5 (18.7%) say they read daily in their free time. (Cross, 2025). Both of these figures are at their lowest level in twenty years, since the NLT began tracking reading enjoyment.

However, Cross wants us to reconsider what reading looks like for kids in 2025, as according to her, kids are still engaging with narrative, albeit through digital platforms. Even so, this is conflating reading with screen time, which is perhaps reductive of the problem at hand. If “screen use has a negative impact on children’s cognitive abilities, such as memory and language” (Li et al., 2024), and today we are seeing toddlers with iPads, it is plausible to suggest that redefining ‘reading’ to better fit our digital age is not the solution.

David Fickling Books website, 2025.

Nonetheless, Cross contends that we need to do this by shifting the language we’re using to engage kids with reading, replacing “pleasure” with “fun.” Which sounds like a good idea, except, to demonstrate this, she spotlights the work of The Phoenix Comic Books– a comic-book imprint of DFB launched in September 2024. She credits their success to date to its emphasis on making reading “fun” for kids.

But is this merely a redefinition of reading for ‘fun’, or is it an oversight of children’s rapidly declining attention spans? What DFB is doing is adapting to trends to survive as a children’s publisher in a world where children are simply not reading books anymore.

The Phoenix Comic Book imprint, 2024.

At what point are children going to begin reading for pleasure, if all they know is YouTube shorts, iPad game apps and splashy comic books that require minimal engagement effort? Born in 2000, reading for me was Lemony Snicket, Jacqueline Wilson and eventually The Hunger Games – a series read by both adults and 10-year-olds when I was in primary school. Books and comics were two very separate media. Most kids were capable of sitting down with the black and white pages of a book. I mean, does this poster scream reading time to you?

Absolutely, it is better that kids are reading comics than not reading at all. But this is not traditional reading, which is especially required for essential cognitive development at these very young ages. (Li et al., 2024). The focus of this blog is certainly not to affront Cross or DFB, but rather to use their recent work with the TPCB to spotlight an interesting trend, a necessity for their survival as a children’s books publisher in a volatile market.

Bibliography:

Cross, L. (2025). The Joy of Reading. Independent Publishers Guild Autumn Conference. 16th September 2025, Hyde Park, London.

M. Li, R. Zhao, X. Dang, X. Xu, R. Chen, Y. Chen, Y. Zhang, Z. Zhao, D. Wu, (2024) ‘Causal Relationships Between Screen Use, Reading, and Brain Development in Early Adolescents’, Advanced Science. 2024, 11, article no. 2307540.

Image references:

David Fickling Books Website (2025) Logo. Available at https://www.davidficklingbooks.com/ Accessed 13 October 2025.

Independent Publisher Guild (n.d.). IPG Conference Autumn 2025. Independent Publishers Guild. [online] Available at: https://www.independentpublishersguild.com/IPG/SharedContent/Event/Feature-Event-AC.aspx?EventKey=c942b772-a674-4c8f-9746-0e13dae769a0&iSearchResult=true Accessed 13 October 2025.

Spanoudi, M. (2024) ‘David Fickling Books and The Phoenix Comic to launch new comic-book imprint’ The Bookseller. Available at https://www.thebookseller.com/news/david-fickling-books-and-the-phoenix-comic-to-launch-new-comic-book-imprint Accessed on 13 October 2025.