I am not a huge comics and graphic novel reader (too many books already on the TBR pile, but the fact we have a huge graphic novel bookshop in Oxford that I walk past every day means I am sure it will happen), but it's part of the market I am always interested to follow because it's one where there's so much potential for indies to do something new and exciting (and successful), especially online with the growth of platforms like Naver Webtoon.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
So, it was really encouraging to read Mark Williams's look at the announcement that this year's Frankfurt Book Fair will put comics on center stage. The show will feature a Comics Business Center bringing together stakeholders from all interested industry sectors to talk rights, acquisitions, and potential. Williams points to the significant growth in book-to-screen pipelines around comics, manga, and webtoons.
That kind of pipeline is something we are already familiar with through platforms like Wattpad, but it's encouraging to see a wider recognition of the potential for taking works from page to screen.
And for writers, it's important to realize we are also sitting on film rights, and it's no longer ridiculous to think about how to exploit them.
Print Reading Still Dominant
Talking of what people read, this piece of research from Pew Research Center is noteworthy. It found that in 2025 more Americans read in print than digital (audio and e-book combined). Nearly two-thirds had read a print book, while between a quarter and a third each had read an e-book or listened to an audiobook.
That's not quite the full picture, of course. The overall figures show a very slow decline in print reading from 72 percent in 2011 to 64 percent in 2025, while for e-books there has been an increase from 17 to 31 percent and 11 to 26 percent for audio in the same period. And as one might expect, younger readers are more likely to read electronically.
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