Listicle: 10 book trends that will fire up your reading in 2024

Writer Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s debut novel, The Secret of More, was shortlisted for the best fiction book at the Tata Literature Live awards in 2023. She says she’s noticed more “people enjoying coming together over books, whether they read the same book and discuss it, or bring books to swap with others, or talk about whatever book they happen to be reading, or simply read silently together in a park or an open space.”

It’s like the field suddenly exploded. Amazon had four Stuff Your Kindle Days in 2023, when they offered deep discounts on books (even bundling in free ones). In addition, Romance Bookworms (Romancebookworms.com) has been clearing out its catalogue every few months, offering free books on popular reading devices. Standard Ebooks (Standardebooks.org) turns clunky digitised scans of classics into readable versions, with cool covers too.

The genre that keeps some publishers in business has books about more than business. “The past year has been especially great for locally commissioned non-fiction titles in terms of numbers,” says Sayantan Ghosh, executive editor at Simon & Schuster. Books about India and economics have done well, as have popular science and wellness titles.

Language-based networks, villains of the moment, still have questionable story-writing skills. But the tech is helping readers in new ways. Legible, a company that fuses the audio and ebook experience, just debuted the world’s first interactive version of A Christmas Carol. It allows readers talk to with the characters, discuss the plot, ask nuanced questions, and explore ideas, all within the ebook. Next up, Animal Farm AI, out this month.

Hearing a book being narrated to you, in a celebrity voice, turned out be the luxury no one knew they needed. Audible’s Indian catalogue now has more than two lakh titles. Project Gutenberg is using AI to create 35,000 hours of audiobooks. Listen to it at 2x to race through, or enjoy a story languidly unfolding in your ear on the commute.

To no one’s surprise, Ghosh says that these categories will fire up non-fiction shelves in 2024. “The sales of titles related to history have never been better. There are more awards recognising history books written for the trade and commercial market,” says Ghosh. He hopes it makes for a more robust community of historical fiction readers and writers in India. We love a good story, retold.

They’re everywhere — in fiction, non-fiction, memoirs — and they fit right in with the teaspoon-sized attention spans of the Internet generation. They are colourful, evocative, and intimate. “Project Bibliography creates zines around classic books and new works to present literature to the Gen Zs. It does better with bite-sized content,” says Priyanjali Datta, MarComm and Literary Relations Lead at the JCB Literature Foundation.

Love stories from Odisha, thrillers from Bangladesh, memoirs we’d never have accessed. “Publishers are more and more looking towards regional Indian languages, perhaps not as widely spoken elsewhere, but with a rich literary scene in their respective states, for translations,” says Ghosh. In 2023, the JCB Prize for Literature in India featured three books in translation of the five on their shortlist. The winning book, Perumal Murugan’s Firebird, is a translation from the Tamil original to English by Janani Kannan.

Critics thought social media would kill books. Instead, book-themed pages, Reels, and accounts have offered 10-second teasers for new works. Authors have connected directly with fans on Insta. Videos have recapped scenes over and over. Datta even discovered a dating app, Bookmark, to meet and date readers. “Although it is fairly new, it matches people based on their reading choices, which I think goes to show that for some at least what they read is an extremely integral part of their personalities and they are happy to make life choices based on this.”

Prince Harry’s Spare kept gossip mills running for weeks last year. This year, Ru Paul is coming out with a memoir, as are Crystal Hefner (wife of Playboy‘s Hugh Hefner), Salman Rushdie and a second volume by Britney Spears. Artist Ai Wei Wei’s memoir, Zodiac, will be published in graphic novel form, We cannot, cannot wait.