Kobo Says the One Big Bestseller List Is Splitting Into Smaller Reading Crowds
Rakuten Kobo's chief executive, Michael Tamblyn, says the old idea of a single bestseller list is fracturing. He made the point in the company's report on book trends for 2026, published on 11 November 2026.
Kobo sells e-books and e-readers, and Rakuten, the Japanese internet group, owns it. A bestseller list ranks the titles selling most in a given period, and for decades it has been treated as a rough map of what the whole country is reading. The Kobo report suggests that map is getting harder to draw.
According to the report, niche reading communities are growing in place of single viral titles. A niche community is a group of readers gathered around one shared taste, such as a particular genre or mood, rather than a crowd all reading the same book at once. Instead of one book dominating every conversation, many smaller groups are each following their own favourites.
The report also names several trends it expects to shape reading. One is hockey boyfriends, a romance style inspired by the title Heated Rivalry, in which a love story unfolds around ice hockey players. Another is romance infused with magical realism, a style where the everyday world carries a light touch of the impossible.
For readers, that mix means the next book to try may come from a smaller corner of the shelf. Someone who loved one romance may find a whole community waiting, with its own recommendations and its own in-jokes, rather than a single title that everyone else has already read.
For publishers and booksellers, a split market means more than one kind of audience to reach. A title no longer needs to appeal to everybody to find its readers. It does need to be found by the right group, which is a different job from pushing one book to the top of a national chart.
Still, they give a clear picture of where the company believes readers are heading, and Tamblyn's comments put the change in plain terms: the single, shared list that once told everyone what was popular is no longer the whole story.
