Chris Barker

It’s no secret that publishing is struggling at the moment. Can someone with no idea what he’s talking about* save it?

People mostly read on screens

Picture the scene: you take a train journey in 2025. Almost everyone around you is looking at a screen. Reading on a screen, in most cases. Most people probably read more, in terms of word count, than they did before the smartphone was invented.

If that is the case, why aren’t people reading as many books?

Before you read the next sentence: I am a book lover. I have been since I was in primary school. I love the smell and texture of books. My house is full of books. I am, no joke, considering buying a bigger house to make it easier to store my books.

The physical book is, sigh, outdated as a medium to deliver information and entertainment in 2025.

Before you kill me, here are my reasons:

1. Books are inconvenient to carry. Try fitting a George RR Martin novel in your pocket. If you want to take two books on public transport, you need a bag. Or choose very small books. Any more than that gets ridiculous.*
2. Books are inconvenient to use compared to a smartphone. Assuming you are carrying a bag, you need to dig around inside it to find your book. You need to mark your place somehow, which means keeping some sort of bookmark or bending a page. A smartphone, sly devil, jumps right into your hand from your pocket.
3. Physical books have no ‘advanced’ features whatsoever. When you’ve finished one, if you want to read the next in the same series, you need to trek to a real, physical bookshop and hunt for it. (Or order it delivered and wait a day or two). If you want to read at night, you need a lamp or a torch. If you don’t understand a word, there is no built-in function to allow you to look up that word. Etc.
4. Physical books are expensive to make, store, and transport. That’s bad for the publishers, the author, and the customer.

Paper-and-cardboard books one million percent have their place. They are fantastic gifts, look great in your house, they have texture and history. They are better for kids who can’t be trusted with a digital device. Physical books are never going to go away.

They just aren’t the best way for most adults to actually read most books, most of the time, in 2025.

Why don’t people read books on smartphones?

If all that is true, why don’t people just read books on their phones? I believe there are a couple of reasons:

1. Smartphones are bad for reading books. The screen is small, and the battery runs down quickly. I read Prince Harry’s Spare on a mobile phone; it gave me a pounding headache, and not just because of the content.
2. Smartphones are too distracting. Social media apps are designed to create engagement through frequent notifications, whether they are really needed or not. It’s hard to settle down and read anything when you are receiving messages and notifications every couple of minutes on average.
3. It’s easy to forget to read books on a smartphone, because there are so many apps that they get lost in the shuffle.

A single-use device for reading books is needed

Fortunately, one already exists. It’s called a Kindle.*

Some will dismiss a Kindle as an inferior iPad or smartphone. ‘You don’t need a single-use device to read books! Everything is digital now!’

I believe the Kindle has a few killer apps that make it great for reading books in the age of the smartphone:

1. The battery effectively never runs out. A Kindle stays charged for a week if you’re using it regularly, and about a month if you’re not. Charge it at night and you’ll never have to think about it running out during the day.
2. It can store thousands of books, far more than a phone or an iPad. Adding a couple of books to my (admittedly ancient) iPhone used all the free memory. There is no anxiety about adding additional books to your collection.
3. Convenient to carry: a Kindle has a 5-6″ screen, which is fine for reading, but also small enough to fit into a coat pocket, a small bag, or a purse. At a stretch, it can fit into a trouser pocket. This is super important because it means you can read it on the train or bus.
4. Not that expensive. A basic Kindle costs £94.99, and the industry can probably make a knock-off or package it as a loss leader to make it cheaper still. That’s peanuts compared to an iPhone 17, which sells for £1099.99. It also saves money on books- a new paperback costs £12, compared to £5 or less for a digital version. That means a Kindle will pay for itself after about 13 books.
5. Soft factors: anti-glare screen, you can read it in the dark (important for me: I have a new baby). They can also look nice- I have a cover for mine which makes it look like a small paper book, which is really cute.
6. It gives you options without being too distracting. People with unlimited choice in entertainment tend to ‘channel hop,’ flicking through different options while not paying attention to any. Think about how people browse social media or the internet. With a Kindle, you do have the option of switching to a different book or short story, but the choice isn’t unlimited.
7. It’s a screen. People are addicted to screens.

The plan

This is the section for which I have done the least research, which is impressive considering the amount of not-research I have done for the rest of it.

The basic idea is to transition readers from physical books to digital ones, primarily read on a single-purpose device where they can’t be distracted by anything else.

Implementation:

1. Device loss-leader. Make a new version of the Kindle, or a knock-off, which is heavily, heavily marketed. The most comforting, most sophisticated present this Christmas, etc.
2. It should look attractive- most Kindles look basic or techy, it would be great to design one with a ‘softer’ look, more like a real book. Add a folding cover to protect the screen, with a nice design, and away we go.
3. The price should be under £100, probably as cheap as they can make it, to get mass-market penetration.
4. It should come packaged with enough books that the average person feels they are getting a good deal, but not so many that they never buy anything again.
5. Give them one of the hottest new bestsellers (preferably in a series, so they will want to read the next one), then bulk out with out-of-copyright ‘classics’ which most people want to own, but won’t choose as everyday light reading. Dickens, Shakespeare, The Great Gatsby etc etc. Books that are prestigious but also very cheap to include in digital form. Offer different bestsellers and designs to different demographics.
6. Offer deals designed to hook new readers. E.g. ‘buy the first one in this hot new series, get a discount on the rest.’ Aim particularly for younger readers so you can get them into the habit of buying lots of books.
7. Purchasing new books should be seamless and work really well. One or two clicks gets you the next book in the series.
8. Advertising should be included- not during the reading experience, but the home screen should prompt you ‘click here for the best deals,’ ‘click here for the bestseller list,’ ‘click here for books like the ones you have read recently,’ etc. Kindle makes it bizarrely difficult to find the bestseller lists at the moment.
9. Resolutely resist the urge to make it multi-purpose. It should only connect to the internet for purchasing new books.

Will this work? I have no idea. I know that my reading has drastically increased since I started carrying a Kindle everywhere, but anecdote is not a substitute for data. Hopefully something like this can create a cadre of heavy readers who will support the industry in the future.

Reading isn’t going away. More people read more words than ever. We spend half our lives staring at screens, reading.

I say we work with rather than against our screen addiction, and give books a chance to thrive.

*My (lack of) credentials: I am a business journalist and have been for the past eleven years. I have some understanding of how businesses in general work, but not specifically publishing. Technically, I work for a publishing company, but not on the publishing side.

I am an avid reader, and I want there to be more of us.

**I walk to the library every few weeks to get books for myself and my baby, and 6-10 is about as many as I can comfortably carry in a backpack. The newest hardback I picked up, ‘The End of the World as we Know It,’ has about 800 pages and weighs approximately as much as my baby.

***I am not sponsored by Kindle, despite raving about it for the next few paragraphs. If you prefer, substitute any compact digital reading device for Kindle.