Children’s reading shows simultaneous rise and decline. How can that add up?

The number of youngsters reading for pleasure has declined sharply, but this sector of publishing is booming – which results in some very strange maths

Are children reading less – or more? I’m confused. If less, then what happened to the 854,262 copies of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars that were snapped up last year in the UK, according to Nielsen BookScan, or the 481,662 copies of David Walliams’s Awful Auntie? If more, then what’s with all the doom-mongering?

A mischievous friend of mine once hatched a theory about Jeffrey Archer’s sales figures which could only be proved by the discovery in years to come of millions of copies of Cain and Abel mouldering away in remote warehouses. Clearly, for Messrs Green and Walliams, one would have to come up with a different scenario – cobwebbed towers of virgin ‘Aunties glaring balefully from the back of toy cupboards across the land, perhaps?

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