Reflections from the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair
Now that the Strange Land Books team has had some time to rest and reflect after the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, it’s time to share our highlights. We were only there from Wednesday until Friday afternoon, so we missed most of the excitement of the days the FBF is open to the public. That’s not to say that the trade days of the FBF are not exciting – and we have a few fun things to share.
Day 1 began with the traditional presentation of publishing data. Starting with the Nielsen Book Data of the Global Book Market in 2024, we learned that the year was “shaped by strong fiction, declining non-fiction, and slower price increases.” Volume growth was seen in markets such as Brazil and India, with strong sales of Crime & thriller, Romantasy, Children’s fiction, and comic strips. Generally, the book market is showing a positive trend globally. Next came the European publishing report by publishing data rock star Enrico Turrin, the deputy director of the European Publishers Federation, which again shows us that nominal vs. real statistics in the book market show a broader problem. Book prices haven’t been adjusted for inflation and while that helps consumers, it hurts the industry. There’s a slow return to purchasing in bookstores, and the children’s books sector is slowing down, but still strong. Audiobooks are still rising, but it’s hard to keep track due to streaming platforms and an inability to assess what titles are being streamed. Generally speaking, titles are up, but revenues are stagnant, again due to book prices staying lower than inflation. There’s a shift to digital and audio subscriptions and a rise in the second-hand market. Lastly, there is a rise in reading books in their original language, which is mostly English. There is a bit of a panic about the decline of readers as well, as statistics are showing 39.5% of women and 55.5% of men in Europe claim to not read at all, with 51.3% of the total citing “no interest” as the reason. Ouch.
Moving on to less depressing events, there was a lot of activity at the Studium Rund ums Buch stage with a presentation on audio book research in book studies by Professor Corinna Norrick-Rühl (University of Münster) and Millicent Weber (Australian National University; Fellowship of International Scholars at University of Münster). Later in the day, we heard from Swara Shukla about her research on Wattpad and the reading of serialized fiction (listen to the CodEx Machina interview with Swara here).
We visited one of our favorite book booths, Ylva Publishing, to pick out a book to read for our Strange Land Book Club and to interview the founder of Ylva Astrid Ohletz. Also on the first day we discovered our favorite booth of FBF 2025 – the Cheongju Early Printing Museum in Cheongju, South Korea. They were at the fair this year to raise awareness about a book titled Jikji, or Baegunhwasangchorobuljo Jikjisimcheyojeol, which was published in two volumes in 1374 by Buddhist monk Baegun (Gyeonghan) to express the major teachings of Buddha and the monks of India and China. It is the earliest known book to have been printed in moveable type, almost a century before Gutenberg’s famous Bible. Right now, the second volume of the book is housed at the National Library of France, and quite simply, the Koreans want it back.
Highlights of the Jikji booth include a digital representation of the material book, projected onto real pages that you could turn and interact with to learn more about the book and Korean early printing techniques. They also had a lot of hands on materials where you could do your own printing of a page from the book, do some practice binding, and carve your own type! There were traditional costumes you could try on as well as a raffle, and you could write postcards that were sent from Korea after FBF was over.
It wouldn’t be the Frankfurt Book Fair without an engaging and interesting discussion hosted by the Hof and moderator Felix Zeltner. This year’s topic was AI and the Battle for Reality, including some audience poll responses which showed that AI doesn’t seem to have a lot of trust amongst the bookish crowd. However, AI development has an impact on the publishing landscape that we are all still trying to figure out.
On Thursday night we decided to be proper adults and attend one of the many Sektempfang opportunities offered by various publishers, and we headed to the Querverlag booth and had a great discussion with one of their co-founders, Jim Baker, about their 30 years in publishing and book fairs and their amazing catalogue of LGBTQ+ books – from fiction to poetry to essays.
The guest of honor this year was the Philippines, who did a lovely job decorating their pavilion. They had an ongoing video that taught us a bit about Filipino book history, as well!
Obviously, there was a lot more to do and see at Frankfurt Book Fair 2025 – and we did a lot of it in a short amount of time! We are already looking forward to 2026.
You can listen to our podcast episode “A Day in the Life of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025” here.
