The London Book Fair, a Gambian classroom, and the question the publishing industry can’t keep not asking.
The Quietest Book Fair in Years
Something shifted at the London Book Fair 2026, and it was most visible in what wasn’t said.
In previous recent years, AI dominated the conversation with the fervour of a theological dispute – passionate defenders, indignant resisters, and everyone else somewhere in the middle, performing a position. The fence is is-so-comfy at this time of year.
This year, by most accounts, the temperature had dropped. Not because the question had gone away, but because, in some unspoken collective reckoning, it had been settled. The argument had been won.
Nobody quite dared say so, for fear of upsetting whoever was still licking their wounds in the corner. But the resistance had curdled into something more passive, and passive acceptance, as anyone who has watched a technology transition play out in slow motion knows, is only a short distance from embrace.
Into this atmosphere came one of publishing’s most respected elder statemen, Thaddeus McIlroy – publishing consultant, industry veteran of five decades, and anything but a Luddite – fresh from three days at Olympia and in a melancholy mood that surprised even him.
His essay, published shortly after the fair, is one of the most honest pieces of industry writing to emerge from LBF 2026. Read it in full here. McIlroy had visited the fair just once before, nearly fifty years earlier, flying over from Toronto with the hope of selling foreign rights, without success. Returning in 2026, he found himself thinking – and this is the sentence that stopped me in my tracks and led to this essay – that the fair had not changed at all.
Everything has changed. Yet nothing has changed. That tension is what his essay is really about, and it is now what this one is about too.
McIlroy is not alone in sensing it. Among the small but increasingly influential cohort of publishing professionals who have been willing to say clearly that the industry must adapt or die – alongside AI entrepreneur Nadim Sadek, whose platform Shimmr.ai is putting operational money behind the argument, not merely rhetorical weight – he represents something important: the long-term insider who has earned the right to ask uncomfortable questions, and is now asking them.
The most uncomfortable question Thad McIlroy poses, almost in passing, is this: what if none of this matters?
Hamsters, Accounting Departments, and a Cruise Ship Engine Room
McIlroy’s central image of the LBF’s International Rights Centre is worth spending time on.
The IRC is, or so it is said, the fair’s celebrated beating heart: described in its own promotional language as “a professional, purpose-built space where agents and rights holders can conduct pre-scheduled meetings with publishers, editors, scouts, and other industry professionals from around the world. It’s where deals are made, partnerships begin, and stories cross borders.” (Yeah, that was me highlighted pre-scheduled. I’ll swing back to the point shortly.)
McIlroy ascended to the second-floor hall and found hundreds of buyers and sellers across white desks, deep in conversation, books and papers in front of them.
I hope Thad will forgive me reproducing it here. It’s powerful in so many ways.
McIlroys’ first thought was of bees buzzing. His second, describing it to someone that evening, was of a cruise ship powered by hamsters on wire wheels.
Later, looking at his photograph of the hall, he thought of the accounting department in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment: rows of interchangeable human units performing the same function, in perpetuity. (An image from the film in Thad’s OP makes the point – but that would stretch fair use too far to reproduce it here too.)
It is a wry image, and certainly a melancholy one. It reminded me of school. Schools, rather, not my school – we don’t have desks at my school!. But the cemetery model. Rows of desks in uniform lines, everyone doing the same thing at the same time.
But what makes it interesting analytically is that these metaphors aren’t describing failure. They’re describing the system working as intended. The rights hall is not broken. The people are not in any way incompetent. They are doing their jobs with professionalism and purpose.
And yet the whole structure might be rotating on an axis that has already shifted. Which is very much Thad McIlroy’s point.
McIlroy draws his own parallel from the printing industry – territory he knows intimately, having spent much of the 1990s consulting for companies wrestling with the arrival of desktop publishing. He watched, up close, what happened to the men who assembled photographic negatives by hand in dimly lit rooms.
Some retrained. Most didn’t, or couldn’t. The position disappeared entirely.
By 2024, the US printing industry had shed nearly 60% of its workforce from its 1998 peak. Nobody at the London Book Fair was sparing their UK printer counterparts much thought then. Nobody at LBF 2026 is spending much time thinking about whoever comes next.
Progress has its own momentum, and industries, like people, are better at performing concern than at enacting it. What matters is that transitions be managed with some recognition that human beings are caught in the middle. Not to arrest progress – but to guide it.
The printers were not Luddites fighting change in the way we see the resistance to AI today. The printers faced real job losses, not the fantasy losses from AI conjured up by the Society of Authors from disingenuous data that pre-dated the launch of Chat GPT.
And there’s the thing. When the printers – and in the UK the miners before them – were facing real and tangible job losses, communities were hollowed out, not by change itself, but by change administered without care. The lesson was not learned then. There is little sign it is being absorbed now.
Ceremony and Necessity
Here is a question the publishing industry has been studiously avoiding, and the pandemic briefly forced into the open: what, exactly, is necessary?
Let’s start with the IRC. The International Rights Centre is a spectacle worth examining on its own terms.
Consider what it actually contains. Not books – there are no books in the International Rights Centre, only covers and mock-ups. The LBF is not a pubic-facing fair. The actual consumer is the last thing on anyone’s mind.
Not negotiations in any meaningful sense – the pre-scheduled thirty-minute meeting in 2026 is the endpoint of a process that began months earlier over email, in submissions portals, on Zoom calls. The work of evaluation, the work of interest and counter-interest, has already been done. What happens across those white desks is ratification, not discovery. Ceremony, without even an attempt at theatre.
Think of the National Boat Show, where you might reasonably expect to see boats. Or a motor show, where there are at least chassis and concept cars to walk around.
The IRC offers publishers the outline of a process, staged for an audience that already knows the plot. Nobody travels halfway around the world to a rights meeting to sell or buy a book the other party knows nothing about and has thirty minutes to evaluate.
Perhaps that was genuinely how it worked fifty years ago, when Thad McIlroy flew over from Toronto hoping to meet someone who might be interested. In 2026, the meeting exists because the meeting has always existed. That is a different justification entirely.
We know this because we – society – ran the experiment. The pandemic cancelled the book fairs. The rights meetings did not stop – they moved to screens. The deals kept happening.
And here is the detail that tends to get quietly forgotten in the industry’s fond reminiscences about the return of in-person events: publishing emerged from the pandemic stronger in sales terms, not weaker. More books were sold. Fewer people were sitting in rows at white desks in an upstairs hall in London, and yet the stories kept crossing borders.
Publishers had told governments, in the scramble for financial support during lockdown, that books were essential products – akin to food and medicine, products whose supply chains must be protected. Bookshops, they argued, should be permitted to remain open. It was a bold claim, and largely a successful one politically.
But it did not hold up to scrutiny. No one died because they lacked access to a particular book, in print, on a particular day. The essential argument was, in truth, a commercial argument dressed in the language of necessity – understandable in a crisis, but revealing in retrospect.
Do we want a rights centre? Of course. The relationships forged and renewed in that hall carry genuine value, and human beings doing deals in the same room remain capable of a quality of connection that no video call has convincingly replicated.
Do we need a rights centre? Only, it seems, when there isn’t a pandemic. That is a rather different kind of essential.
The stands, panels and discussions present a different and more complicated picture. These are simultaneously the most important and least important elements of the modern trade fair.
Most important are panels and discussions, because genuine intellectual friction – when panellists have the nerve to ask the difficult question rather than the diplomatic one – can produce real insight.
The audiobook discussions at LBF 2026 are a case in point: usually substantive, frank, engaging with the actual shape of disruption rather than performing neutrality around it.
Least important because fifty or a hundred people in a room, with no meaningful dissemination mechanism, is a tree falling in an empty forest. The discussions were often powerful, but the LinkedIn aftermath – a flood of “I was there” posts, rich in photographs and gratitude, but mostly absent the ideas that were actually discussed – is the publishing industry’s equivalent of McIlroy’s hamster wheel. Enormous energy. Visible motion. Very little light.
The Foundation Nobody Talks About
The rights hall buzzes. Agents meet scouts. Deals are signed and titles acquire new territories. The conversation is about what to publish, where to sell it, how to price and position and translate it. All of which assumes, beneath the entire edifice, something that rarely gets named: that there are readers. That people have been taught to read. That somewhere in their formation, someone invested in the capacity that makes every single transaction in that hall possible.
Educational publishing is the largest segment of the industry in many countries. It is also the segment that publishing’s more glamorous conferences tend to treat as the worthy but slightly dull relative at the family gathering. And yet without it – without the textbooks, the curricula, the professional development of teachers, the cultivation of reading as a habit rather than a chore – there is no market. The literary fiction, the narrative non-fiction, the self-help titles stacked on the stands: all of it rests on a foundation of literacy that education either builds or fails to build.
So when McIlroy asks what if none of this matters, the educational publisher might reasonably respond: it doesn’t matter if we’ve already lost the reader at the beginning. And in many parts of the world, that is precisely what is happening – not because AI has sucked the value out of books, but because the publishing industry has never adequately put the value in.
A Classroom in The Gambia. In the 1920s.
I work in The Gambia. I have a photograph of a Gambian classroom from the 1920s. Children in rows. Teacher at the board. The chalk, the posture, the arrangement of bodies in space: familiar to anyone who has sat in a classroom anywhere in the world.
Now imagine the same image with long trousers on the teacher and a modern uniform on the children. Walk into almost any school in the country in 2026 and you will see the same thing. Not metaphorically. Physically. The furniture, the pedagogy, the relationship between the teacher and the taught – unchanged in a century.
The primary textbooks, where they exist, are twenty years out of date. Primary mathematics for Grade 1 runs to 48 pages for the entire year, on the principle that a textbook is defined by its existence rather than its content.
Secondary materials are produced, it sometimes seems, specifically to extinguish curiosity: black and white, tightly packed, written for rote reproduction rather than understanding. Critical thinking is not a casualty of the system. It was never invited in.
I don’t use them. My students are ahead.
Because here is what the absence of adequate materials forced me to discover: everything a child needs to encounter, wonder at, interrogate, and understand can be found online, in image or video format, and a good teacher with a flatscreen television in class and an internet connection at home can build a lesson that no textbook would come close to.
The constraint became the pedagogy. Scarcity, it turns out, is a remarkably effective teacher of teachers.
And then came AI, which took what was possible without traditional books to a level that I am still, honestly, adjusting to. I’m just scratching the surface of what is possible in the classroom when books are not available.
Do We Need Books?
I want to be careful with this question, because it is easy to misread. I am not asking whether we want books. I want books. I miss books in ways that are almost physical – the non-fiction that rewards slow reading, the novel that changes the light in a room, the children’s picture book that does something no screen has yet convincingly replicated.
The question of want is settled, for me, in favour of books without reservation.
The question of need is different. And it is the question that the industry – gathered in its rights halls, its booths, its networking events – has the most difficulty asking, because the answer might be uncomfortable.
Thad McIlroy’s imagined AI voice in his essay is unforgettable:
“Books are a thing of the past. Certainly they were useful in their time. But I tore off their covers, scooped out the good meat inside, and discarded the shells. I’ve digested their not inconsiderable value, in the process reducing the bookish format into the merely decorative, or the distractingly entertaining. And I moved on.”
That voice is sinister in the context of a thriving literary culture.
From the context of a classroom with no textbooks, or with textbooks that are worse than nothing, it reads rather differently. If AI can deliver the nutritional content without packaging that was never adequate to begin with, is the loss of the packaging something to mourn?
The honest answer is: it depends who you are, and where.
For the rights professionals in the hall at Olympia, the book is both product and purpose, and its continued existence is, for now, not in serious question.
For the child in a rural Gambian school with a 48-page maths book and a teacher who has never received a day of genuine professional development, the question of whether books are necessary is not even the right one.
The question is whether meaningful knowledge can reach them. Whether curiosity can be cultivated. Whether the thing that every transaction in the rights hall ultimately depends upon – a reader – can be made.
We do not need books in the way we need food and medicine. We established that, somewhat uncomfortably, during lockdown.
What we need is what books, at their best, have always carried: the capacity to inform, to challenge, to ignite. The vessel and the cargo are not the same thing. The industry has, for understandable commercial reasons, spent a long time insisting that they are.
What Happens Next?
Outside the exhibit hall at LBF 2026, Thad McIlroy encountered a young poet from Berlin, Dan K. Sigurd, sitting with an old portable typewriter and a sign offering poems for three words. Most people walked past. McIlroy stopped. He gave his three words – artificial intelligence is – and waited.
The resulting poem is modest and deliberately unresolved. Its pivot is the line “I can’t make up my mind.” The inscription in the book Sigurd signed for him: “A machine, does it dream?”
The poet Sigurd with the typewriter is not resisting anything. He is demonstrating something: that the human act of sitting with uncertainty, of reaching for meaning without insisting on resolution, survives every disruption – and perhaps needs disruption to find its clearest form. He is also, it should be said, running a perfectly viable micro-business in the lobby of a trade fair, with no rights centre required.
The industry gathered at LBF 2026 is not wrong to keep meeting. The relationships are real, the rights trades are real, the books that result are real. But the quietness around AI this year felt less like confidence and more like the held breath before an admission. The argument has been won. The question is no longer whether the landscape is changing, but whether the people and institutions caught in the change will be guided through it with care, or simply processed.
Progress will take its course. It always does. The printers know that. The strippers in their darkrooms knew it. The teachers in Gambian classrooms whose pedagogy hasn’t shifted in a century are about to find out. The executives in the IRC, scheduling their pre-agreed meetings across white desks in an upstairs hall in London, may find out sooner than they expect.
The only question that carries any ethical weight is not whether – but how.
And what, when the hamsters finally stop running, happens next?
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.
