For the Cultura Foundation, how do you give young people a taste for reading?

Client: Cultura - Fondation
Year: 2026
Expertise: UX research Ethnography UX strategy Service design

The challenge

Young people are reading less and less. Several recent studies are clear on this. But knowing that the practice is declining doesn't help us understand why, or identify what could reverse the trend. The Cultura Foundation wants to move beyond that finding as part of its 'Tous à la lecture' commitment. We need to understand what is really at play in young people's relationship to reading, and how to build concrete responses.

For the Cultura Foundation, how do you give young people a taste for reading?

Project flow

01. Framing and kickoff

02. In-store observation

03. Young reader surveys

04. Bookseller interviews

05. Research report and readout

06. Co-design workshops

07. Reader testing and delivery

TL;DR This project is a field study, at the crossroads of social research and service design. It lays the foundations for an original concept designed to help booksellers recommend better and to help young people see themselves more clearly in reading recommendations. The ambition is to spark the pleasure of reading among young people who haven’t (yet) had the chance to experience that feeling. You can also check out our behavioural study to build the Cultura personas.

Young people and reading: a complex subject

Lots of preconceptions. Reading is one of those subjects where everyone has an opinion before we’ve even started. It’s reputed to be elitist, reserved for cultivated families, in competition with screens. Those representations cloud the thinking. And often, they steer solutions in the wrong direction. That’s why Cultura asks us to help them explore the subject. Not from a desk, but by going out into the field to question our assumptions. By taking a step to the side.

A two-fold methodological challenge. To understand the taste for reading, you have to talk to the young people themselves. Not just to their parents, and not only through them. The subject is socially loaded though, so when an adult is present, children tend to give the answer they think is expected. When it’s not the parent answering on the child’s behalf. Collecting direct, authentic speech, across several age groups, with both readers and non-readers, is a methodological challenge in its own right. The brief also has a second part. Can we create reading profiles to improve bookseller recommendations to young people? This second goal means understanding booksellers’ practices and constraints, and going all the way to designing a workable concept. Two ambitions that we choose to bring together in a single setup.

Exploring the reading ecosystem

Reading before asking

Before meeting the young people, we take the time to understand the territory. The literature review already produces its first surprises. A recent study by the National Literacy Trust (2024, United Kingdom) directly contradicts the deterministic view that social origin shapes the taste for reading. The study shows that students on grants and those not on grants show the same appetite for reading. Clémentine Beauvais, a researcher specialised in children’s literature, goes further: we simply don’t have the keys to give people a taste for reading. Not for lack of data, but for lack of understanding what is really at play. So this isn’t familiar ground we’re clearing. It’s ground that’s poorly understood.

Two little girls in front of an art library

Visiting reading mediation venues

Reading doesn’t take place inside study reports. It takes place in the aisles of libraries, in cultural megastores, in homes. We begin with mystery visits to cultural mediation venues to immerse ourselves in the subject. A library with a children’s space, an independent bookshop and a Cultura store give us some interesting first feedback. Enough to prepare more targeted conversations with industry professionals.

A 7-year-old girl reading at the library

Talking to the experts

After this first immersion in reading spaces, we talk directly to professionals in the sector and to specialist contacts at Cultura.

A Cultura bookseller in the children's literature section

Talking to book-market experts

On the publishing side, people point out the paradox of the sector (a “supply-driven market” where demand is created), wondering how to fuel the appetite for reading in the face of screen consumption. They tell us about the “magical power” of reading as a horizon to reach as early as possible. Across the book trade, they confirm that they measure every day how hard it is to move forward on subjects this cross-cutting.

Building on Cultura's reading expertise

On the Cultura side, we first meet the people who oversee the offer for young readers, to understand how the subject is handled behind the scenes. To touch the field reality, we run 12 in-depth interviews with experienced Cultura booksellers from across France. These interviews explore their working conditions, the recommendation strategies they use day to day, and the information they spontaneously pick up about their young customers.

These conversations bring out the tensions, the powerlessness and the good practices that the literature doesn’t show. At the end of this exploration, we have a framework structured around six lines of inquiry that lays the foundation for our data-collection tools. On the bookseller-reader relationship, the professionals’ practices are sophisticated but often implicit and very dependent on individual experience. That last point makes passing them on to less experienced booksellers more complex.

booksellers and book experts involved in the project

Probing the place of reading among young people with a hybrid setup

An Akiani stand for running interviews in a Cultura store

A child answering an online questionnaire on a computer

By questionnaire: feedback from young French people, those who like reading and those who don’t. Meeting them in store mostly reaches young people who are already in contact with books. To go beyond that (toward non-readers first, and toward geographic and social diversity), the method has to be adapted. We build a questionnaire that’s distributed online to 500 young people aged 6 to 15, spread across the French educational cycles (cycles 2, 3 and 4). Boys/girls parity, a mix of urban areas, a mix of household income levels are our criteria. For the youngest (6-8 years old), we set up a virtual avatar that reads the questions out loud and can repeat them if needed. The adult stays present but only steps in if there’s a comprehension issue. This setup aims to capture the child’s voice as directly as possible.

In store: the direct voice of young readers. We set up in three Cultura stores with a dedicated stand. That choice isn’t random: in a bookshop environment, young people are already in a positive relationship with books, even those accompanied by an adult. Being there in person lets some of them spontaneously pick a book to illustrate what they’re saying. We observe their behaviours, their hesitations, and we capture the spontaneous phrasings. The kind of detail no questionnaire ever gives you.

560

young people aged 6 to 15 involved in the study

All the data, from the field and from the questionnaires, is analysed along one structuring axis. What sets apart the young people who like reading from those who don’t?

The main conclusion of the study fits in a single sentence:

Toward reading profiles

Probing the opportunities

Two questions sharpen for the next part of the project: How do you help a young person build that self-knowledge? And how do you equip the bookseller to help them get there?

The study reinforces a conviction. Every young person has several reading profiles, depending on the context. And booksellers are already doing reader profiling, intuitively. What’s missing is a tool that helps both the young person know themselves and the bookseller bring them together with the right book.

A young female reader picking out a book in a library

Co-designing, with booksellers and subject-matter experts

We run two workshop sessions with the Cultura project team and booksellers, building on the young-reader study. The first session establishes a shared vision. What is a reading profile? What criteria make it up? The second session shifts into operational mode: how do you roll it out? In what usage context? With what risks? We end up with a list of prioritised actions, a projected customer-bookseller journey, and a first prototype draft precise enough to consider a testing phase.

Summary and outcomes

This project delivers two kinds of value for the Cultura teams.

A knowledge base on young readers. Cultura now has a fine-grained, documented understanding of what’s at play in young people’s relationship to reading. This material complements the national studies in the field. It draws on 560 individual stories and dozens of hours of direct conversations. A rare resource that breaks down preconceptions and lays solid foundations for shaping future initiatives. The analyses are run by first comparing those who like reading and those who don’t. Other angles of analysis are possible. To get the results in front of more people, Cultura has just published a summary of the study together with 7 misconceptions about young people and reading.

A service prototype to help spark a taste for reading. The project laid the foundations for a testable service concept. A reading-profiles system that could support Cultura booksellers in their recommendations to young people. The road to an MVP is mapped out. The criteria are defined, the usage conditions are mapped, the risks are identified. The next step will be to test the concept on a small scale before investing in the data infrastructure. This project illustrates the conviction that guides our work. Understand in order to design. That’s often the order in which things really move forward.

A huge thank you to the entire team for the quality of your work and your tremendous commitment to this fascinating and essential topic. It has been a real pleasure to work with you. Your support has been decisive in helping us better understand and grasp this complex problem. Hats off to you!

Eric Lafraise, Societal cause team, Fondation Cultura