The sky, it turns out, is not falling. It never was. And the sworn enemies of yesterday are today’s most valuable strategic partners. How publishing’s pattern of moral panic, contempt, and eventual embrace tells us everything we need to know about the AI debate.
There is a particular kind of institutional amnesia that publishing has perfected over the decades. It involves loud, confident predictions of catastrophe, followed – sometimes years, sometimes only months later – by the quiet, embarrassed absorption of the very thing that was supposed to destroy the industry. No apology. No acknowledgement. Certainly no self-reflection. The story simply gets rewritten, and the new version proceeds as if the old one never existed.
George Orwell understood this mechanism intimately. In 1984, the Ministry of Truth’s operatives didn’t merely suppress inconvenient history – they replaced it, seamlessly, with whatever the present moment required. Winston Smith’s job was literally to correct the historical record so that today’s ally had always been an ally, and yesterday’s friends were always our enemy. I sometimes think Orwell may have had a publishing trade body in mind. Or Donald Trump.
I raise this now because of something that happened quietly in advance of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2026: the announcement of a dedicated Comics Business Centre, a Webtoon Area developed with a Webtoon Ambassador, a full Frankfurt Global Network programme focused exclusively on comics, manga and visual stories, and the casual observation – offered as simple market intelligence – that publishers now view webtoon-to-Netflix pipelines as “strategic decisions.”
The sky, it turns out, is not falling. It never was. And the sworn enemies of yesterday are today’s most valuable strategic partners.
But to understand how remarkable this is, you have to remember where publishing stood on both of those sworn enemies – comics and Netflix – not so very long ago.
Comics: Kids’ Stuff, Not Serious Reading
Full disclosure: I loved comics. Past tense because I simply don’t get the time to explore modern, twenty-first century comics in any meaningful way, so I cannot in confidence and honesty rave about them in the way I did comics in the last century But rave, I most certainly did.
As a teenager I argued long and loud with my English and art teachers at school about Marvel comics. They were literature, I insisted. They were quality art. They were up there with Dickens and Shakespeare, Picasso, da Vinci and Van Gogh.
The teachers were unconvinced, as teachers of their era (and any era) tended to be. That is, until I set myself the task of proving them wrong, by organising a comics exhibition, in school, titled Why Teachers Are Totally Wrong About Comics (And Need To get A Life).
Those of you who have read my brief LinkedIn bio will know I hated, hated, hated school. So much so that I became a teacher just to show them how to do it properly. But here, I’m taking you back to nineteen-bow-and-arrow when I was fourteen or so, the school’s most truanted pupil bar none, and the school’s most intractable problem. Not that I was disruptive. Just that, I didn’t follow the script. (TNPS regulars will know the feeling.)
And in twentieth century school terms that was a problem. School attendance was not optional, but I was rarely there. Attendance on any day in a given week was an invitation to teachery sarcasm. “To what do we owe this rare pleasure?” “Wet the bed, did you? Had to come to school while the sheets dry out?” “Lost your fishing rod?”
Oh so witty. I’d smile politely and say, “I’ve heard it said – don’t know if its true – that those who can’t, teach.” By framing it as an observation, not a statement, I got away with it. Nowadays, I’m not so fussed about being diplomatic, again as TNPS regulars will know.
So usually of a school day I was to be found walking the beaches, fishing, exploring cathedrals and monuments, or heading off to the London Museums for a real education. Sitting in class listening to a teacher drone on about whatever their lesson plan said they had to drone on about was not my idea of fun.
This was a problem for school not because of my truancy, but because I still aced English, geography, history, science… In fact everything except maths, sport and RE. This was an embarrassment to my maths, sport and RE teachers because I laid the blame fairly at their feet. “The lessons are boring. How can A + B = C? They are not even numbers. Was Jesus on Noah’s ark doing his loaves and five fishes routine, because otherwise how could Noah feed all those animals? How will throwing a javelin help me get a job? I could be sitting by the river reading a book and fishing.”
Other teachers had mixed feelings. I knew every capital in the world (there were fewer countries back then), read science books for fun, could tell the art teacher the years Constable and Turner were born, and could write a mean essay about Dickens or Austen or Wordsworth. The teachers had the satisfaction of knowing I made them look good even though they knew I learned more at home than in their class. And despite “wasting (my) time reading” – pause for dramatic effect and to collect enough contempt to have it dripping from their tongues – “comics”.
On the days I did attend school (science lab days, mainly, and when I needed to raid the school library) I was usually to be found during PE sessions in the school greenhouse, under the tomatoes table, reading comics. For some reason the teachers found this unacceptable. More what I was reading than where I was hiding. “What is this Spiderman and Avengers nonsense? No-one will remember this rubbish in twenty years time!”
And so comics became my school identity, almost. They irritated the hell out of teachers, and that of course meant I had to read them in class too. Irritating the hell out of teachers was my teen mission in life.
On one fateful occasion I had been tricked into attending school on a PE day. The science lab teacher was off sick and his class has been passed to the PE teacher to look after, and I got caught sneaking off to the greenhouse with a bunch of comics and physically steered to the football pitch – a place as alien to me as the dark side of the Moon.
But there was a silver lining. It was a nice day, the action was at the other end of the field, and turns out goal posts are perfect for leaning against to read. I was so engrossed I failed to see the action relocate my way, until an extremely loud whistle blew in my ear and an irate PE teacher marched me off to the Head’s office.
It happened that this was the first week of a new Head. The old dinosaur has retired mid-term on health grounds – not a moment too soon in my opinion. I had no sympathy for Heads then, and after decades teaching still have none!
The temporary replacement Head was one of the new-school teachery types that believed children had the right to be heard. It was Christmas and my birthday all rolled into one!
He wanted to know why I felt reading comics was more important than football, and I explained that the chances of me ever becoming a professional footballer were, shall we say, slim, whereas my ambitions to be a scientist, explorer and to work with Stan Lee in the New York Marvel bullpen were both possible and worthy goals.
“Ah yes, this comics obsession of yours. I’ve been hearing about that.”
I explained that the comics I read were both educational – I had an intimate knowledge of the geography of New York, and knew about cosmic rays (Fantastic Four), gamma rays (the Hulk), radioactivity (Spiderman) – and just as much literature and art as Chaucer or Botticelli.
And instead of erupting into spasms of uncontrollable laughter, the Head took the offending comic in my hand – a British Marvel reproduction of the full-colour US Marvel Tomb of Dracula series – and flicked through the pages.
“It’s in black and white,” he noted.
I almost blurted out, “Nothing gets past you, sir” (nothing tries my patience like a teacher stating the obvious) but this was a new Head and he deserved a chance, and besides, he was actually holding the comic in his hand, not throwing it across the room.
“The American versions are in colour,” I said. “But I prefer the black and white reprints. They are more atmospheric.”
“Atmospheric,” repeated the Head slowly, as if he’d never heard a child use a four-syllable word before.
“It’s the same with films,” I explained, realising the Head was actually listening to me. “Compare the modern Hammer Horror Dracula films with Christopher Lee with the 1918 Nosferatu or the original 1931 version of Dracula with Bela Lugosi, which was filmed in black and white and colourised later.” (I was a huge film buff back then and while other kids could name every footballer that ever played at Wembley, of fifty varieties of dinosaur, I was quietly obsessed with dates.)
The Head stared at me. “Have you read the Bram Stoker original?”
“Of course,” I said. “Once I read the comic adaptation, I had to read the book too.”
The Head looked at the comic again. “You read a classic of English literature because of this?”
“This is a classic of modern art,” I said, opening to a page. “Look at this. Gene Colan is an artistic genius. They call it painting with pencils. Its so fluid it’s almost liquid. And look at the angles. Like camera shots. Cinema on a page.”
The Head said, “Can I keep this until the end of the day? I’ll give it back then.”
The next thing you know, I’m commissioned to create a comics exhibition at school, based on the Marvel Classics series from the ’70s, but also featuring everything from Dr Strange to Spidey to Thor, and some classic DC lines (Superman, Batman, etc) and also classic younger audience British comics like the Beano, Dandy, Bunty and Twinkle intended to show teachers how comics could get children reading at a very young age.
Much later (2007 or so) Marvel introduced new classics adaptations – everything from Ivanhoe to Pride & Prejudice. I wish they had been available when I was at school.
Why Teachers Are Totally Wrong About Comics (And Need To Get A Life) got me a page in the local newspapers, as much for the brackets as the exhibition. The Head had reservations, but let me keep it.
The PE, RE and maths teachers made a point of not attending, but my English and art teachers came with reservations and left with a changed perspective. But they still missed what I considered the more fundamental point: that comics for younger children were how you got children reading in the first place.
The publishing industry has ever had precisely the same blinkered problem, only with the additional dimension of commercial contempt.
Comics were in the UK published weekly in periodical format. They didn’t fit the industry model. They were, by definition, ephemeral – here today, rubbish bin tomorrow – which placed them outside the respectable taxonomy of books.
The phrase “kids’ stuff” was not merely dismissive; it was the entire analysis. Academic and literary gatekeepers, as one 2011 essay noted, simply “do not readily see children’s and adolescent literature as complex, sophisticated, or worth critical attention” – and comics were placed firmly below even that already-undervalued category.
The contempt extended into higher culture with almost comedic vigour. In 1998, Neil Gaiman was invited to a university by the art department. When the English department faculty discovered he had written for comic books, they didn’t merely decline to attend – they picketed. They marched with signs. Gaiman’s response captures something important: “I felt illicit, smuggled in. It made it at least twice as much fun.” That anecdote tells you everything about how the literary establishment treated the medium: not as a legitimate competitor, not even as a serious subject for debate, but as a contagion to be kept out of respectable spaces.
The concept of the “graphic novel” emerged partly as a linguistic workaround for this contempt – an attempt, as one analysis put it, to use the word “novel” to lend the medium “respectability because of its literary connotations.” Even that concession came grudgingly: the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as late as 2013, felt it worth noting that comics were earning “a modicum of respectability within the literary establishment” – and the choice of “modicum” speaks volumes about how limited that acceptance remained.
The most perfectly encapsulated expression of this attitude came in 2022, when Webtoon ran subway ads in New York with the tagline: “Comics are literature’s fun side-hustle.” The backlash from comics creators was immediate and furious. But what strikes me now is that this was Webtoon, a comics platform, describing its own medium in those terms. The industry’s contempt had so thoroughly permeated the culture that even those who should have known better internalised it.
Art Spiegelman – whose Maus won the Pulitzer in 1992, a full thirty-three years before Feeding Ghosts would become only the second graphic novel to do so – described the pursuit of literary legitimacy as “Faustian,” warning that the medium would become “spoiled by its desire for legitimacy.”
He was, at least in part, right. The industry’s acceptance of comics came not from a genuine reassessment of the medium’s value, but from the belated recognition of its commercial potential, particularly once Marvel and DC films began generating billions and the webtoon model demonstrated the appetite for serialised visual storytelling among younger global audiences.
Manga was treated as an affront to serious publishing. Anime as the beginning of the end. Now both drive acquisition strategy at the world’s most important trade book fair. Winston Smith will be kept busy this year!
Netflix: The Destroyer of Reading
The comics story is old enough to feel like history. The Netflix story is recent enough to sting.
When physical fiction sales in the UK fell by 9 percent, the Publishers Association’s then-CEO Stephen Lotinga explained it to The Times in terms that perfectly capture the genre of blame that publishing reaches for whenever the numbers disappoint: “One of the difficulties that fiction comes up against is the sheer pressure on people’s leisure time.”
That quote appeared in an article whose entire premise was that Britons were abandoning novels for Netflix box sets. The PA had explicitly identified streaming as a primary culprit for the sales decline. A German study released in 2018 decried what it called a “dramatic” decline in book readership attributable to time spent on streaming services. The headline from Phys.org was blunt: “Not read a book lately? Blame Netflix, says study.” A Harvard Business School historian, speaking to Marketplace, deployed the memorable – if beyond nonsensical – claim that the average human attention span had fallen below that of a goldfish, from twelve seconds in 2000 to eight seconds by 2013.
This was the industry’s explanation for its difficulties: not pricing strategy, not pricing ebooks to protect print margins, not the failure to properly account for the hundreds of thousands of digital downloads that Nielsen BookScan was missing entirely. Netflix. Attention spans. The goldfish.
I wrote about this at the time on TNPS, noting that the same PA report blaming streaming for declining fiction sales was simultaneously recording growth in digital audio. The inconvenient arithmetic – that 750,000 digital book downloads a day in 2018 went uncounted by the industry’s own tracking services – didn’t feature in the streaming-panic narrative. Nor did the Amazon Kindle Unlimited data, which in 2018 alone paid out nearly $218 million to participating self-publishing authors. The industry was choosing not to see enormous swathes of its own market in order to maintain a simpler, more satisfying villain.
While the trade press repeated the attention-economy fantasy as if proven fact, TNPS was busily challenging the nonsense buzzword by buzzword.
Mark Schaefer put it directly in 2021: “People today do not have short attention spans. Your content has a short interesting span.” The goldfish comparison, he observed, was “more than a myth. It’s an excuse used by lazy marketers.” People were spending twelve straight hours playing video games. They were binge-watching entire seasons of television. The problem was never attention. The problem was (and is) relevance and value.
Fast forward to Frankfurt 2026. Publishers now actively court Netflix for adaptation deals. Webtoon-to-Netflix and manga-to-anime pipelines are described as driving “strategic acquisition decisions.” Netflix executives have been attending the London Book Fair and Frankfurt Book Fair for years, scouting for IP. By 2019 – while the attention-span panic was still running hot – Netflix had already retained a literary agency exclusively for book-scouting and was developing dozens of adaptations. The relationship had been deepening even as the rhetoric of threat continued.
In the first thirteen weeks of 2026, book adaptations appeared on Netflix’s Global Top 10 lists every single week. Book-based titles drove over nine billion global views in 2025 alone, representing nearly a fifth of all hours watched on the service. The industry that blamed Netflix for destroying reading is now celebrating what it calls a direct translation from “views” into “sales” and “listens.”
A few details to ram home the point.
Alice Feeney’s novel His & Hers was propelled to number fifteen on Amazon’s bestseller list by its Netflix adaptation, with audiobook listens surging 494% on Spotify. Emily Henry’s People We Meet on Vacation already approaching three million copies in print – skyrocketed back onto the New York Times bestseller list, with a 97% increase in sales across all formats in the two weeks after the film’s release. Jennifer Iacopelli’s Finding Her Edge, following its Netflix announcement, attracted thirteen new international translation deals; the paperback with a Netflix tie-in cover sold 500% more copies in eight weeks than the original hardcover had managed.
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials Mystery saw a fourfold lift in UK sales. The Bridgerton series by Julia Quinn tripled in sales alongside Season 4. And the co-showrunner of His & Hers, William Oldroyd, offered the publishers a line they could have put in a press release: “I really admire what Netflix is doing to help the sale of books and equally how literature has given Netflix some of its biggest hits. Long may it continue.”
Long may it continue. This from the industry that, eight years ago, was citing Netflix as the primary reason Britons were abandoning novels.
The story was rewritten. The destroyer of reading became “the ultimate engine for literary discovery” – Netflix’s own phrase, used without apparent irony in the same report. No announcement was made about the change of position. No acknowledgement that the position had ever existed. The Ministry of Truth had already handled that.
The Pattern, Not the Instance
What we are observing here is not a quirk of the Netflix era or a peculiarity of how the comics world was treated. It is a recurring pattern, and it is as old as the hills.
Paperbacks, when they arrived, were accused of cheapening literature. Television was going to kill reading – a claim that surfaces with remarkable persistence across the decades, and which has been empirically falsified so many times that its continued deployment requires either genuine amnesia or deliberate dishonesty. Video games were going to destroy a generation’s relationship with narrative. Ebooks were going to eliminate physical books. Self-publishers were going to flood the market with slop and put the industry out of business. Streaming, as Markus Dohle memorably told a court, would destroy bricks and mortar retail.
Each time, the industry adapted, discovered new revenue streams, and quietly dropped the prophecy of doom. Or rather, it moved the goal posts, changed the name of the villain, but the prophecy of doom remained the same.
The TNPS archive back to 2017 is, in one sense, a longitudinal record of this cycle – the same alarmist framing, the same selective use of data, the same rhetorical manoeuvre of identifying a bogeyman and attributing to it the explanatory power that properly belongs to the industry’s own structural conservatism.
The formula is consistent. A new technology or format arrives. It is different from what the incumbent industry controls. It therefore represents a threat.
Not because anyone has done the analysis, but because difference itself is threatening when your business model depends on a particular order of things.
The loudest voices are those with the most to lose from the transition, which means they are also, by definition, the least well-positioned to understand what is actually happening.
Panic ensues. Declarations are made. Studies are commissioned to confirm what everyone already believes. The Luddite Fringe parties while the going is good. But eventually, the commercial reality becomes undeniable. The industry pivots. The old enemy becomes the new pipeline. The Ministry of Truth gets to work.
And Now: AI
Hold this pattern in mind as you read – you already know where this is going.
The language being used about artificial intelligence in publishing today is structurally identical to the language used about Netflix in 2018 and 2019, about manga in the 2000s, about ebooks in the early 2010s.
The Authors Guild, in a rare moment of clickbait lunacy I have come expect from the UK’s Society of Authors or the Publishers Association, have described AI as an “existential threat to their profession.” More than seventy authors have petitioned publishers to curtail AI use. The word “existential” appears so frequently in these discussions that it has begun to function less as a precise descriptor and more as a rhetorical intensifier – a way of signalling that the speaker considers themselves among the serious people, the ones who grasp the full magnitude of what is happening.
Now some of the concerns are legitimate, lets be fair.
- Training data and copyright is a genuine legal and ethical issue that has yet to be resolved.
- Voice actors and translators face real displacement pressures that deserve serious policy attention.
- The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content on retail platforms is a nuisance, though it is worth noting that the same platforms were drowning in low-quality human-generated content long before AI arrived, and the industry’s response to that was equally ineffectual.
In fact, right now AI-slop is shaping up to be the bogeyman du jour, but it’s just the usual industry scare-mongering.
But the existential framing – the sense that AI represents something categorically different from all previous disruptions, a threat so profound that it cannot be accommodated, only resisted – is where the pattern reasserts itself. Publishing has survived the rise of paperbacks, the introduction of television, the video game era, the ebook transition, and the streaming revolution.
What the loudest voices in the current AI debate are not yet willing to acknowledge is the version of this story we will all be telling in ten years. By 2035, or perhaps earlier, some significant portion of the publishing industry will be using AI tools as standard workflow infrastructure.
Rights teams will be using AI to identify adaptation opportunities across formats. Editorial teams will be using it for first-pass manuscript assessment. Marketing departments already are, widely. Publishers Weekly has reported that 47% of publishing houses are already using AI in their marketing departments, and 40% use it for editorial tasks like proofreading and plagiarism detection. The sworn enemy is already inside the building.
And at some point – Frankfurt 2035, perhaps, or the London Book Fair, or whatever the dominant industry gathering of that era turns out to be – someone will announce a new initiative leveraging AI pipelines for rights management, or AI-assisted translation as a market development strategy, and it will be described as a “strategic decision,” and nobody will mention the pickets, the petitions, or the existential crisis.
The story will have been rewritten. It always is. Always will be.
The Orwell Problem
I return to Orwell not as literary decoration but because he identified something precise about how institutions manage cognitive dissonance. The Ministry of Truth didn’t burn books. It replaced them with corrected editions, and it did so continuously, so that the gap between what was true yesterday and what is true today never became visible enough to cause a crisis of legitimacy.
Publishing’s version of this is less systematic but no less effective. It works through the natural turnover of personnel, the short institutional memory of trade media, and the remarkable human capacity for motivated reasoning. Nobody has to lie. People simply forget what they said, or they never quite said it as bluntly as the record suggests, or the context was different, or the technology has matured since then, or this time really is different.
It is never different. The technology matures. The industry adapts. The threat becomes the pipeline. The pickets come down. The awards get handed out.
I argued to my teachers, as a schoolboy, that Marvel comics were literature and quality art. I won them over by showing them the evidence – the Dracula adaptation, the Frankenstein adaptation. Not by shouting. Not by petitioning. By demonstrating, through the work itself, that the contempt was a failure of joined-up thinking rather than a failure of the medium.
That is still the right approach. The sky will not fall. It never does.
But why let reality stand in the way of the latest opportunity for self-righteous indignation and scaremongering?
Publishing wants to have its cake and eat it. And by complaining bitterly about everything new and then embracing it as an old friend it gets to have both.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter.
