The Bookshop That Was Never There

In my last article, I was focusing on the importance of reading volume. And yes, it’s an unglamorous truth that the children who are getting through the most words are going to end up the furthest ahead in academic terms. However, that rather begs a question I skated over a touch. Because if reading is this awesome tap that you can just turn on and it’s a silver bullet, what is making it run dry in the first place?

And, despite the fact that most of the think-pieces out there want to focus on phones or willpower or the moral fibre of Gen Z, I think it’s actually all very much simpler.

It’s supply.

Too many kids, and especially boys, don’t ever get to read the thing they’d love to immerse themselves in because it’s simply never within arm’s reach.

Susan Neuman and Donna Celano spent a year walking four neighbourhoods of one American city, tallying up every book a child might be able to get their hands on. They counted all the books they found in the shops, the childcare centres, the school libraries and the public ones. And the gap they found was... not ideal.

In the most affluent neighbourhood, there were about thirteen children’s books for every child. And in the poorest, there was one, a colouring book, for roughly every three hundred children.

I mean... yeah.

But what about the libraries, I hear you cry! They’re supposed to exist precisely to help level all of this out, aren’t they? Not so much. There were fewer books in the libraries in the less affluent areas and they were also open for shorter hours.

So the most obvious fix here more or less just writes itself, right? We just need to properly fund the libraries. We flood the poor neighbourhoods with books. We level the shelves and let the reading follow. Job done.

Which is where the research gets properly intriguing, because someone actually tried to do exactly that.

Neuman and Celano focused in on that city for another ten years. And a foundation poured twenty million dollars into modernising the branch libraries and matching the collections across rich neighbourhoods and poor ones.

Equal shelves, at last!

And... it didn’t work.

The resources might have become level, but the reading still wasn’t. In the poor neighbourhood, the teenagers spent just as long in the library, but a full 42% of that time was spent “reading down”, below their own age level. The affluent kids read at it or above. There were exactly the same books available, but the gap still didn’t close. In fact, over the ten years of the study it only went and widened!

Or, as the study puts it, “the more the more, the less the less.”

And that’s because what turned out that made the difference wasn’t the books. It was who was standing next to the child.

In the more affluent library, there was an adult reading with the kids for the better part of every hour. Whereas in the poorer neighbourhood, over the same time period, the researchers noticed that not a single adult came to read in. And the computers in this area, without adult supervision, turned into “the video arcade.”

A book within reach is not the same as there being a hand guiding you into it.

But here’s any interesting twist as this week’s conclusion. Because, when you think about it, that access problem, the one a twenty-million-dollar cheque couldn’t fix, has actually been solved for a huge cohort of boys. By their phone.

A boy in the poorest postcode in the country now carries, in his pocket, access to more free fiction than Chestnut Hill’s thirteen-per-child ever dreamed of. And Kindle Unlimited is a low fee for an insane catalogue, with audiobooks just another tap away. The shelves a twenty-million-dollar foundation couldn’t equalise are, for anyone with a handset, almost completely infinite in range.

But remember what the affluent children had that the poor ones didn’t. Not more books, but someone reading alongside them.

Sources

• Susan B. Neuman and Donna Celano, ‘Access to Print in Low-Income and Middle-Income Communities’, Reading Research Quarterly, 36.1 (2001), 8–26.
• Susan B. Neuman and Donna C. Celano, ‘Worlds Apart: One City, Two Libraries, and Ten Years of Watching Inequality Grow’, American Educator, 36.3 (2012), 13–23.
• Vel Woven, ‘You Are Not Alone (Just Niche)’, Royal Road Forums (2025).