The problem may not be that people no longer want books. It may be that the conditions around reading have changed.

Time has become harder to protect. Cost has become harder to ignore. Attention has been pulled into smaller and smaller fragments. For many adults, reading has not disappeared because it stopped mattering. It has been crowded out.

That is the question sitting behind the Booker Prize Foundation’s latest campaign, which will see 12,000 books given away as part of an effort to bring more readers back to fiction. The choice of short fiction is not incidental. It suggests a practical answer to a practical problem: if people feel they no longer have the time, concentration or money for books, perhaps the route back is not through a lecture about reading, but through a book that can meet them where they are.

“We haven’t heard anyone say that they don’t want books,” says Gaby Wood, Chief Executive of the Booker Prize Foundation. “There’s no denying that the world has changed — there are more distractions, many of which have rewired our attention spans.”

Wood does not reduce the problem to screens alone. People’s lives change. Their appetite for reading changes. Their time changes. And in a cost-of-living crisis, books can become harder to justify.

“It’s not surprising that books aren’t first on everyone’s list when the price of bare necessities has risen so sharply,” she says.

That matters because the public conversation around reading often becomes moralistic very quickly. Adults are told they should read more, concentrate better, spend less time online, return to books as if they have simply misplaced a good habit. But the language of obligation can make reading feel more forbidding, not less.

Wood’s argument is gentler than that. Fiction, she says, is not there to scold the reader back into virtue. “I think the idea that reading is something you ‘should’ do is hugely offputting,” she says. “Fiction is there to shift the everyday preoccupations of your mind.”

The Booker campaign began with the idea of a novella. But the foundation moved towards short fiction because a collection could open several doors at once.

“Actually we began with the idea of a novella,” Wood says, “but realised that it might appeal to people to be able to dip into the work of several different writers in one book. That way if you want to read more, you’ll find there are dozens of books already available by these seven authors.”

That is the quiet strength of the form. A short story does not ask the same contract of the reader as a novel. It can be entered quickly. It can be carried. It can sit inside the broken spaces of a day that already feels full.

Wood thinks of books as companions rather than monuments. One of her favourite small books is Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, first published in the 1960s as part of the Pocket Poets series. The title matters. Lunch runs through the poems; the book belongs to the hour stolen from work, the walk outside, the small break in the middle of ordinary life.

“I’ve often thought you could build a whole series of books around the idea of lunch,” Wood says. “The idea being that a pocket-sized book can be a companion over a lunch hour. I think sometimes people imagine books as much more forbidding than that.”

That word — companion — is the key to the whole campaign. It moves the conversation away from decline and towards use. A book is not only something to finish. It can be a voice beside you. A pause. A way of being briefly accompanied by another mind.

This is also why libraries, bookshops and public reading campaigns still matter. They do not simply move books around. They change the atmosphere in which a person encounters a book.

“They play a huge role,” Wood says. “Libraries and bookshops aren’t just places where books circulate. They’re communities and havens.”

The wider culture seems to be moving in the same direction. Reading is increasingly being talked about not only as private discipline or literary achievement, but as a form of attention, companionship and social repair. Reading groups, bookshop communities and public campaigns all point to the same desire: not simply to finish more books, but to recover the conditions in which reading feels possible.

The point is not to turn fiction into medicine or wellness content. It is simpler than that: reading often returns when the conditions around it become humane again.

“You might want to feel supported or transported or still,” Wood says. “Environments that you already associate with those things make it much more likely that a book will speak to you.”

Among the writers included in the Booker collection is Nadifa Mohamed, whose work often moves across history, memory, migration and private lives under public pressure. For Wood, Mohamed’s contribution shows how much short fiction can hold without becoming overburdened by explanation.

“Nadifa is an incredible writer who manages to marshal complex historical and cultural information and fuse it with the fate of individuals you instantly care about,” Wood says.

The story included in All Around the World follows Filsan, also known as Corporal Adan Ali, and carries the reader into the heat and danger of a road out of Hargeisa. Wood points to the way Mohamed creates historical and political pressure without flattening the story into background.

“You feel the heat of the road out of Hargeisa and sense — without knowing the exact date — the politics of the government and the aims of the rebels,” she says. “But what stays with you most is the title character, Filsan.”

That is one of short fiction’s particular gifts. It does not need to provide everything. It can leave the reader with a life, a pressure, a single moment that continues to work after the story ends.

The campaign’s immediate aim is clear: get 12,000 books into people’s hands. But Wood hopes the effect goes beyond the giveaway itself. The book is also available to buy and borrow, including through Waterstones and libraries.

“We want it to reach the people who appear to need it most, and that’s what the gifting programme is for,” she says, “but it’s a book for everyone.”

Success, for Wood, would mean more than distribution. It would mean readers finding a way to make fiction part of ordinary life again.

“If it can inspire people to incorporate reading into their day-to-day lives, and to know that Booker Prize authors write in a variety of accessible ways, then — I can’t help coming back to the idea of companionship — the campaign would be a success if more people felt less alone.”

That may be the strongest argument for the project. Not that short fiction is easier in a diminished sense, or smaller in ambition, but that it can meet the reader without demanding that the reader first become someone else.

For someone who has stopped reading regularly, Wood’s message is simple.

“Reading really good writing is like having someone tell you a brilliant story: in the pub, at school, at bedtime, or by whispering in your ear,” she says. “Everyone’s had that experience enrich their lives at some point — by picking up a book they can have it over and over again, whenever they like.”

That is the case for short fiction now. Not as a compromise, but as a way back.

At lunch. On a bus. Between shifts. In a library. In the half-hour before sleep. In the thin space left between everything else.

Sometimes that is enough to begin again.