How to get children to read more again?

There are a lot of things that people from older generations are complaining about the the children of today. One these things is, that children are not reading enough anymore and are instead just sitting in front of the TV, or playing computer games. Sure, this argumentation isn't really watertight, but may be there is also some truth in it. I guess our children are really reading too less, but not all of them. It seems to be a problem of social belonging and not at least a problem of a ineffective marketing. In this text I want to point out some possible reasons for the problem and search for some solutions.

The important question to this topic is why children are not reading books that much anymore. Why did books lost their attractiveness for a large number of children? In my eyes one of the reasons for it is that the publishing industry has a very bad marketing concept. They are still supporting and preferring the old distribution ways (in Germany) and don't get involved with the new media. E-books for example are still not very common in Europe. In Japan for example the publishers reacted faster and now thousands of young people downloading e-books on their mobile phones and are reading them while they are sitting in trains and buses. It became a real hype. With the Internet its now possible for everybody to publish his works very cheap. A lot of very good young authors have now the chance to reach a large number of readers. If the publishing industry would have been faster they could have made leastwise some money, but now they get nothing out of it. Especially young people and kids are using the Internet for a large number of hours during the day, so it should be easy do get their attention for books by advertisements. But in reality you see commercials for everything but books. The publishers are setting advertisements for books mostly in weekly newspapers where it is not really necessary, because most of the readers belong to the group of society who is already reading a lot. It will not help to get new readers. Especially not very young people.

Another point what is in my eyes important to mention is the price for books. They became very expensive in the last years. An increasing number of parents is not able to pay a lot of money for books. They need it for the clothes, for food and another basic expenses. In my eyes, the financial situation is also responsible for the fact, that parents are not reading anymore for their kids. They have no time for it because they have to work to much and are still earning just a basic income.
It also doesn't help when the schools are trying to enlarge the number of readers, when the kids have to pay for the books in literature classes. When I was in school we had to read 8 different books in our German class. For some students it was hard to pay the books.

When we want to get more people to read again in future, we need to make books free every child. The possibility to read books shouldn't be nowadays a question of social status like in former centuries. One idea could be that children get some vouchers for books every year. That wouldn't be that expensive for the government and it would help to improve the education standard. Reading is still the key to knowledge. Books are inspiring our minds our imagination. The Governments and the publishers should work together to keep our great European literature alive.