In her sixties, Aunt Zhang from Shaanxi discovered that her vision was often blurry when looking at her phone. She adjusted the font size of her phone to "super large" and "bold", went to the bookstore to buy books, and also started asking the staff, "Do you have a larger font size?" Like Aunt Zhang, more and more elderly people are facing a series of reading problems such as "too small font size, too dense rows, and too thick books". In order to better meet the spiritual and cultural needs of the elderly population and promote elderly reading, the Ministry of Civil Affairs and 14 other departments issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting Elderly Reading Work" (hereinafter referred to as the "Opinions") in October last year, proposing multiple measures such as expanding the supply of elderly reading materials, strengthening digital resource construction, and optimizing the elderly reading environment. The elderly reading in our country is in the initial stage of development and is a new direction for national reading Xu Shengguo, Director of the Publishing Research Institute of the China Academy of Press and Publication and Director of the National Reading Research and Promotion Center, made the following judgment. What are the reading needs and characteristics of the elderly, and how to provide more high-quality reading services for them? Different fields are exploring. In fact, reading for the elderly is not just about increasing the font size. Who will meet the reading needs of the elderly? When it comes to reading for the elderly, many people's first reaction is health and wellness books. But at the entrance of a library in Beijing, Grandma Luo, with silver hair on her head, smiled and told reporters, "Actually, we don't just read books about health. Like my spouse, she likes history, literature, and documentary books. And I like to read design books." "Older people hope to keep their knowledge updated through learning and reading, and realize their personal value." Wu Jie, director of the Institute of Geriatric Psychology at Tianjin Normal University and a professor in the Department of Psychology, analyzed that reading is beneficial to the physical and mental health of the elderly: long-term reading can reduce the risk of dementia, enhance cognitive ability, reduce anxiety and depression. Reading and learning activities can also provide communication opportunities, reduce loneliness, increase social participation, and bring psychological comfort and emotional support to the elderly. In order to care for the spiritual life of the elderly and continuously meet their diverse and personalized reading needs, the Office of the National Committee on Aging, the China Association on Aging, and the China Publishing Association have been publishing book lists to the society for many years. The "100 Excellent Publications Recommended to the Elderly Nationwide" released in 2022 covers multiple fields such as medicine, food, housing, transportation, usage, education, and entertainment, with a special focus on the new needs and expectations of the elderly in digital intelligent living, establishing a positive aging concept, and paying attention to aging finance and other social development changes. Hualing Publishing House, the only publishing house in China that primarily targets elderly readers, released a lifestyle guide book called "Playing with Smartphones" in 2021. In his research, Wu Jie found that reading difficulties for the elderly are not only caused by the presentation of reading materials, such as small font size, compact layout, lack of visual aids such as images and illustrations, etc. The reading experience of the elderly is often influenced by factors outside of the book. These won't work At a library in Beijing, Grandma Li, who is nearly 80 years old, was stunned by the network search system on her computer. For many elderly people, when they come to large libraries to read, they often randomly find books on the shelves and use digital devices under the guidance of staff. Similar inconvenience in operation is also reflected in mobile reading. A man surnamed Zhang said that he had used a mobile reading app before, but "he often clicked back and forth and didn't know where to jump to," so he reluctantly gave up using it. If you want to download online novels, you also need your child's help. The elderly person said that they are not resistant to digital technology, but they are somewhat "unable to keep up with the situation". Silver age reading is an important group of people for national reading. Overall, the reading demand and supply of this group of people are still relatively weak Xu Shengguo pointed out that compared to other groups such as children, teenagers, and white-collar workers, elderly reading work has not been systematically organized. Elderly reading is a new increment in the publishing industry and will become a new development direction for national reading. How to promote elderly reading through age appropriate transformation, and what are the directions and goals? The Opinion puts forward clear requirements for various work: strive to significantly enhance the supply capacity of high-quality elderly reading materials by 2027, effectively improve the aging level of paper reading materials and digital terminals, basically improve the elderly reading service system, and create a more friendly atmosphere for elderly reading; A group of elderly reading brand projects that are popular, highly participatory, and influential among the masses have emerged, cultivating a group of enthusiastic public welfare and high-quality elderly reading organizations and auxiliary talents; The number of elderly readers has significantly increased, the quality of reading has significantly improved, and basic reading needs have been effectively met. In recent years, various sectors of society have carried out various explorations of age appropriate reading, such as recommending excellent elderly reading materials, organizing elderly reading activities, strengthening the construction of elderly reading environments, and providing age appropriate reading products. Since its inception, the National Reading Conference has established the "Silver Age Reading Forum" for three consecutive years. The crutches, wheelchairs, and reading glasses are standard equipment for elderly friendly services at the Capital Library Li Nianzu, Deputy Director of the Capital Library, said, "According to our reader survey data, there are indeed many elderly people who often come to the library. Some come to read newspapers, attend lectures, exhibitions, participate in volunteer activities, and even take their grandchildren for a walk. Many elderly people regard the library as their second 'living room'." The Beijing Urban Library, which will open in 2023, has made a breakthrough in 'intelligence' - for people aged 60 and above, after binding their reader cards, the screen of the smart desktop will become a large font, and elderly readers can call the staff for one-on-one exclusive services, and even have robots deliver books to their desks. Visual, audible, contextualized, and immersive reading forms are the key to the future development of reading for the elderly. Li Nianzu introduced that on the WeChat mini program of Shoutu Digital Library, there are 3 million e-books, over 500000 audiobooks, and over 1.4 million music tracks that can be tried for free. According to observations, in 2021, audio platform Himalaya also launched a "senior mode" serving elderly users, which includes multiple audio program sections such as news, novels, literature, and opera. Detailed page guidance instructions have been designed in this mode, allowing elderly people to learn how to use the software through guidance. Diversified forms and rich content of reading activities are powerful measures to promote the balance of reading resources between urban and rural areas. In December last year, the Elderly Activity Center (Elderly University) in Keqiao District, Shaoxing City, Zhejiang Province, set up the Le Ling Book Garden and established the Le Ling Reading Club, which held joint reading activities through poetry recitation, exchange of reading experiences, and other forms. Currently, there are more than 50 members. Here, a "Yue Di Wen Cui" bookshelf has been set up based on regional characteristics, and the books on the shelf are all related to the local area of Shaoxing, which is popular among elderly reading enthusiasts. Retired life, can we welcome the spring of reading? "Elderly people also want to know what the metaverse is." Li Nianzu found that elderly people not only participate in health lectures, but also in science popularization lectures and social science lectures. The overall cultural level of the elderly population in our country is improving, and their pursuit of spiritual and cultural aspects is also increasing. The essence of promoting age appropriate reading is to recognize the real reading difficulties of the elderly population and their diverse needs for a better spiritual and cultural life, "he said. Wu Jie's research points out that the biggest differences between elderly and young people in the reading process are mainly reflected in two aspects: information processing speed and eye movement control. Eye tracking studies of elderly people show that they stare for longer periods of time each time compared to young people, especially when encountering unfamiliar words or complex sentence structures, indicating that they need more time to process information. Therefore, compared to young people, elderly people rely more on context and visual cues when reading, such as images or layout design, and improper layout may affect their reading efficiency. Although their processing speed slows down, they can still effectively suppress irrelevant information interference, and their reading efficiency is not significantly lower than that of young people when reading familiar content. Wu Jie suggested that publications can better help elderly people extract information and understand reading content by adding abstracts, summaries, and keyword annotations. Multi sensory reading products can be developed, such as adding voice reading functions, touch based e-books, or providing multimedia experiences that combine images and text during the reading process. These are all directions that China's traditional and digital publishing industries can strive to explore for age appropriate reading in the future. To carry out age appropriate reading work, we need to provide more possibilities for the elderly to learn, where everyone can learn, and where they can learn at all times. There is a "Sunshine Reading Cabin" in the Sunshine Shinkansen community of Chaoyang District, Beijing. The concept of the cabin is "integration of the elderly and the young". This is a new attempt by Duan Ying, founder of the Beijing Ran'er Reading Public Welfare Development Center, to explore rural children's reading after nearly a decade. Entering the elderly stage, people's reading habits actually have certain similarities with their childhood. For example, it is difficult to hold a book with dense text and read it, but I am willing to read some books with appropriate pictures and text With this idea in mind, Duan Ying and volunteers launched an activity for children and the elderly to read picture books together. "After reading the picture books, we will encourage grandparents to tell their stories to the children and let them draw them." From the perspective of cultural elderly care, intergenerational reading is an emerging reading service model, which is a reading behavior that occurs between two generations of different age groups. Duan Ying believes that elderly reading should not only be reflected in book reading, but also in more and broader aspects. In the process of reading for rural children, we found that some elderly people do not know how to read, but they will clap their hands and feel along with their grandchildren reading picture books. Elderly reading is a big concept, and these are concrete and practical directions that we can explore and implement. Xu Shengguo is full of optimism and expectations for the development prospects of elderly reading work. He said that elderly people do not read for utilitarian purposes, and in this sense, retirement life will become the spring of reading. With the improvement of population health and cultural level, the concept of "old age" is also evolving, and many people do not consider themselves to be old age in the traditional sense. In the future, we would prefer to call it 'Silver Age Reading'