As most people reading this will know, 2026’s National Year of Reading is an initiative launched by the Department of Education in conjunction with the National Literacy Trust, aiming to address the "steep decline in reading" among children and young people, as well as adults.

In the department’s press release, they write that reading for pleasure is ‘linked to a range of benefits including stronger writing skills, improved wellbeing and confidence, and even higher future earnings". The National Literacy Trust will be working with the government to deliver tens of thousands of free books to children, launch a marketing campaign to encourage reading and publish a series of papers on the state of literacy in the UK.  

The trust’s first paper, titled The future of literacy: Multimodal reading is packed full of efforts to extend the definition of reading beyond printed matter. It references song lyrics, fan fiction and even "extend[ing] the very idea of reading with video games". It goes on to detail how "reading is expanding beyond words alone to include image, design and interpretation", and our new definitions of literacy must include that. If the National Literacy Trust’s goal is to foster a love of reading in young people, then why has their first step been to redefine reading altogether?

The sections of the report focus in turn on digital reading, audiobooks and comic books. Audiobooks and comic books can certainly foster a love of reading, and can also be more accessible for children who are dyslexic, visually impaired or have other accessibility needs, but should generally be considered complementary to reading traditional printed matter instead of as a replacement, which the report does acknowledge. The section on digital reading, however, makes some leaps. 

The report says that the debate on print versus digital reading is outdated because "today’s young readers live in a rich media universe, with opportunities to consume stories, information and texts across many formats – printed novels, e-books, audiobooks, graphic novels, gaming narratives, video-sharing platforms and more". The first four items here are different forms of books, which are all reading in different ways, but video-sharing platforms do not belong in a discussion on digital reading. Watching a TikTok, fun as it may be, is not reading.

Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with playing games, but is it that relevant to this discussion? Playing a video game is not "reading" any more than watching a film is. They can be intellectually engaging and help young people to build some transferable skills that may help with developing literacy, but that does not mean playing a video game is the same as reading, especially when the most popular games are things like Fortnite, Minecraft and Fifa, which are not narrative driven. A separate report from the National Literacy Trust on routes into reading through video games says that "4 in 5 young people who play video games read materials relating to video games once a month", which is promising at first, but the largest proportion of that reading is "in game communications" (39.9%). I am sceptical that sending and receiving in game messages is particularly beneficial towards fostering a love of reading, or even developing multimedia literacy skills.

If the goal is to get more young people passionate about reading, the solution is not to re-label everything that they are already doing as reading

Reading is fantastic because it challenges you, excites you and opens your eyes to new worlds. To encourage a love of reading, we must encourage a passion for those aspects too. I cannot help but feel that telling a child who says "Usually, I play games or videos that include subtitles" that those activities constitute reading is letting that child down. There is nothing wrong with meeting children where they are, but that is only the start of the journey.

If the goal is to get more young people passionate about reading, the solution is not to re-label everything that they are already doing as reading. That is not making any real change, it is merely a shifting of the goalposts. If the government wants to get more young people reading, the first step seems glaringly obvious: improve funding for public libraries. The UK has lost one in 20 public libraries over the past decade, and of the libraries remaining, a third of them have been forced to reduce their hours due to lack of funding. Deprived areas have been hardest hit by these cuts. Libraries offer not just lending services, but access to e-books and audiobooks, after school reading groups, a space to do homework, and even literacy support programmes for adults. The recent government budget has acknowledged this, with an additional £15m for school libraries, but this does very little to redress the massive cuts to public libraries for the past 20 years. More must be done.

To be clear, libraries will not solve this problem alone – it requires a cultural shift, from less unhealthy screen time to parents spending more time reading with their children. As workers in the book sector, we must continue to take children seriously as readers and help to provide them with engaging, fun and challenging reading material. All of this is important, but a robust and well-funded library sector must be the backbone of any national literacy programme.