gen z reads, just not from publishers

Summary

You often hear that Gen Z no longer reads. We wanted to check it against their own conversations. Nobody commissioned this study: we ran it with GenSight and published it in open access.

Method

GenSight, our listening technology, analysed 11,517 pieces of content over six months, from September 2025 to March 2026: 8,138 on Discord and 3,379 on Reddit. Each exchange was classified by reading format, platform and sentiment.

What we found

Manga, the number one format

With 2,991 mentions, manga comes first, by far. It is often judged better than its anime adaptation.

A book is picked by trope, not by genre

Enemies to lovers, slow burn, dark romance: Gen Z picks what to read with a vocabulary born in communities, not in publishers’ catalogues. “Enemies to lovers” comes up 292 times, with 75% positive mentions.

Readers writing for other readers

AO3 and Wattpad total 1,393 mentions. People write, publish and read each other there, with no publisher involved. Not everything is rosy: Wattpad is mostly criticised across its 742 mentions, and so is BookTok, with 36% negative mentions out of 251.

What it means

Gen Z isn’t abandoning the written word: reading generates almost four times more positive mentions than negative ones. They have simply built their own ecosystem, with its own formats, vocabulary and platforms. For a publishing house, these signals can already be read.