The promising race to get kids reading again

Reading decline happens during the big transition all middle-grade readers go through: moving from short illustrated chapter books to fully fledged novels. | Ryan McVay/Getty Images Something happens to kids when they’re about 9 years old.

Before then, they’re voracious little bookworms, with most of them saying they read for fun at least five days a week .

After their ninth birthday, only 35 percent still do.

Experts call this phenomenon “the decline by 9,” and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to stop it.

They talk up and cherish the books that break through: the Harry Potters and the Percy Jacksons, which got so many kids to keep reading through those danger years and which sold so well through millennial and Gen Z childhoods.

Publishers keep looking for new books compelling enough to keep kids away from their screens and glued to the page.

But for the past 10 years, books for kids ages 8 to 12 (known as middle grade) have been selling less and less.

“It had been happening for maybe a decade, very very slowly,” said Joanne O’Sullivan, a children’s book author and reporter for Publishers Weekly.

What had been a gradual slope got dramatically worse in 2020.

And in the years since the pandemic, publishers have shut down multiple middle-grade imprints, culminating in it happening twice this year .

No one in publishing is entirely sure why kids books stopped selling, but there are two major theories.

One says that children are no longer reading as much as they used to, because they are worse readers than previous generations were.

The age group that used to happily devour Harry Potter is now distracted by iPads and YouTube shorts, so they never developed the ability to sit down and focus on a printed page.

Their reading scores, which started falling in 2014 , tell the tale.