Oh how Twitter scoffed and acted unsurprised as we woke to find our local bookshops had escaped the attentions of the looting riotniks. Waterstone's even challenged rioters to loot them as "they might learn something". Ha ha! LOLZ! Sigh. It's difficult to argue with the stark economic realism of those who weighed up their looting options and came down firmly on the side of widescreen TVs and box-fresh kicks. Maeve Binchys don't fetch a huge resale price on the black market – especially if they're already in the 3 for 2.

But while the rioters' indifference to the intellectual riches on offer at Waterstone's may or may not be attributable to the much-touted death of the book, it does throw up some stark questions. Is reading just for the middle classes? Are you more or less likely to riot if you read? What could books offer the looters anyway?

As the riots fade and the talking starts, all the rhetoric is about community, education, offering the rioters prospects and life expectations and qualifications and journeys towards growing up as well-adjusted members of society.

How better to do all these things than with books?

Maybe it's just a question of class. As the author Gavin James Bower says, "Jobs in publishing overwhelmingly go to white, middle-class people. The product reflects this, which isn't much good if you're a working-class kid." If publishing is full of white, middle-class people is it any wonder that bookshops are too? The writing community can be as diverse as it likes – in class, race, religion and genre – but if publishers don't know how to market these books, they're not going to find readers. Or maybe it starts even earlier, in school, where according to the journalist Kieran Yates "young people often don't feel like they can empathise with a syllabus of literature that is so far removed from their own lives".

But as the children's writer Irfan Master points out, young people are reading "blogs, texts, comics, magazines" all the time. Poet and playwright Sabrina Mahfouz agrees, saying there is a switch in what is read and written, rather than a "demise" in reading and writing. "This is the first generation that is consuming more written content generated by their own age group than from older, adult writers," she writes.

I work for the literature charity Booktrust, which runs a scheme that enables year 7 students to choose a book that is right for them from a carefully curated list. One of Booked Up's successes has been stimulating excitement about books, encouraging library use and helping with the induction to reading at secondary school level. It also helped broaden pupils' reading.

But this is just one project.

We need to extend this, to create a culture that lasts the entirety of young adult life. The people who will want to read will read. Those who might stand to, as Waterstone's put it, "learn something", need to be engaged more.

How does that start? It starts in-house, in the publishing industry. We need to produce more books that relate to these kids and their lives, offering something relevant or aspirational. We need to market these books directly to these audiences, make young people feel included and empowered to read. We need to deliver these books in relevant and contemporary ways. Maybe the rioters would have BBM'd less if they had other stuff to read on their phones.

And most of all, we need to remember what it is that's kept us reading all these years, what got us excited about universes and characters, and use that to foster a love of books in others.