4 . A symbol of a booming children’s book market is a self-styled “kaleidoscope (万花筒) of creative genius for kids”, the magazine Scoop, a startup based in Dalston, east London, which the author Neil Gaiman has described as “the kind of magazine I wish we’d had when I was eight.”

Scoop is the idea of the publisher Clementine Macmillan-Scott. A year ago, hers looked like an impossible venture. But against the odds for little magazines, Scoop has survived. Macmillan-Scott said, “I really wasn’t certain we would get to this point, but we are now approaching our first birthday.” She links the magazine’s fortunes to a prosperous market and reports that “through the hundreds of children, parents and teachers we speak to at our workshops, we know that children are greedy for storytelling.”

Inspired by an Edwardian model, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Newspaperr, Scoop is a mix of innovation and creativity. Establishment heavyweights such as the playwright Tom Stoppard, plus children’s writers such as Raymond Briggs, author of Fungus the Bogeyman, have adopted its cause. The magazine has also given space to 10-year-old writers and pays all contributors, high and low, the same rate — 10p a word.

It’s a winning formula. Macmillan-Scott reports “a quarterly sales increase of roughly 150% every issue”, but is cautious about her good fortune. “It’s all too clear to us that these children are hungry for print.”

Scoop focuses on the most profitable part of the children’s market, Britain’s eight to 12-year-old readers. In literary culture, this is the crucial bridge between toddlers (儿童) and adolescents and its publisher knows it. Macmillan-Scott is committed to listening to readers aged eight to 12, who have an editorial board where they can express their ideas about the magazine. “If we don’t get these children reading,” she says, “we will lose out on adult readers. To be fully literate, you have to start as a child.”

Macmillan-Scott argues against the suggestion that reading is in decline. “If you look at our figures,” she objects, “you’ll find that children do read and that Scoop is part of a craze for reading hardback books. Kids love paper and print. They might play games on a digital device, but they prefer not to read on a Kindle. The real market for e-books is among young adult readers.” Some of her evidence is anecdotal, but her sales figures and readership surveys support a picture of eight to 12-year-olds absorbed in books.

“What our research shows beyond question,” she says, “is that children have a love for reading that’s not seriously threatened by other kinds of entertainment. Reading for pleasure is a very real thing at this age, and the worries that some adults have about children losing interest in reading are simply not grounded in reality.”