On Thursday, we told you about a new study showing the number of parents reading to their children is at an all time low, particularly among Gen Z parents.

And we've heard from Bill Goodman, the executive director of Kentucky Humanities, who wrote an op ed piece about the study.

Well, today.

More from him on how an event like the Kentucky Book Festival coming up this weekend, presented by Kentucky Humanities, helps encourage literacy and reading in children.

The book festival has been around for 44 years now.

Kentucky Humanities took it over from a volunteer group in Frankfort ten years ago.

It was part of our mission of literacy and books and of reading and it's even grown and been so more, so much more since 2015.

Yeah, there's so many great Kentucky children's authors.

I would say so many great Kentucky authors, period.

But so many wonderful children's authors that are so dedicated to writing books that children are interested in and we're so rich in that part of our literacy outreach and what we do and what we try to do at the Kentucky Book Festival.

In some ways these days, with the competition out there for movies and technology and video games and all of that, we have to think a little bit out of the box, if you will, that that's sort of an old fashioned saying, but we have to look at what other book festivals have done, what authors have done well there, what ideas and gimmicks, if you will.

We have just recently, done some work, and we're going to have some costumed characters there.

We've had a magician in the past, and I'm talking a lot about the children and the the family part of it.

We've really grown that part of our of our outreach and our book festival.

In the last I would say, five years, more than anything that we did for the first five years, we always had children's authors there, but we didn't go out of the way to do face painting.

Last year we did some pumpkin carving.

We have to kind of think that other than just getting a book and meeting an author and and maybe having a storytime, which we've always had the authors take turns on a storytime stage, inside Joseph Beth booksellers, to read to the children.

And that's like going to the library on Saturday morning with your child.

So this is happening all at the book festival.

So we've had to look at new ways of, of doing the same old thing, but maybe dressing it up a little bit.

So good to see Bill Goodman, who, as you know, was here for 20 years hosting many of our public affairs programs.