There is a moment most parents recognise. A child who once asked for the same book four nights running starts finding reasons not to. The book goes back on the shelf unopened. Nobody decided anything; it just stopped. It is tempting to explain this with screens, and screens are certainly part of it. But blaming the tablet skips over something more useful, which is that reading is not one skill. It is two things happening at once — the decoding, and the caring. Most children who stop reading have not lost the first. They have lost the second. Decoding is work, and work needs a reason For a child who is still learning, reading a page is genuinely effortful. Each word costs something. A five-year-old is spending real attention on the mechanics, and what keeps them spending it is the pull of what happens next. A phone asks for none of that effort and gives back something immediately. So the competition is not really between a book and a screen. It is between effort-then-reward and reward-now. The only way a book wins that is if the reward is big enough to be worth the climb. The quiet problem of not being in the story There is a second thing, and it is harder to see because it is an absence rather than an event. Children build their sense of what is worth paying attention to partly from what the world keeps showing them. A child who never finds anyone who looks like them at the centre of a story is not usually upset about it. They simply learn, quietly and without anybody saying it, that stories are about other people. That is a very effective way to stop caring what happens next. A book a child is not in is a window. A book a child is in is a mirror. Both matter, but only one of them makes a reluctant reader lean forward. What actually seems to work Let them choose, even badly. A book they picked and abandoned teaches more about reading than one they were handed and endured. Read aloud past the age it feels necessary. Being read to is where the caring gets rebuilt, and it costs the child none of the decoding effort. Keep the stakes low. No comprehension questions at bedtime. The moment reading becomes assessment, it stops being a reward. Find the book that is about them. Not about a child like them — about them. Why we make the books we make Gli Books grew out of that last point. We make personalised picture books in which the child holding the book is the illustrated hero — their face, their hair, their name in the title — in a story set somewhere real, in our first title the canopy walkway at Kakum National Park in Ghana. We are not going to claim a book fixes a reluctant reader. Nothing does that on its own. But we have watched what happens when a child turns a page and finds themselves standing on a rope bridge above a rainforest, and the leaning-forward is real. The effort suddenly has a reason. That is the whole idea. Make the reward big enough to be worth the climb.