MIP London is dead, the Children’s Media Conference is leaving Sheffield, and a fair TNPS has criticised for years is suddenly the centre of an experiment in book-to-screen convergence. Yes, TNPS briefly emerges from The Gambia’s darkness!
In the space of a few weeks, the London Book Fair has announced three things that would each have been a TNPS story on their own if the lights had stayed on here.
The Bookseller’s FutureBook conference is moving to ExCeL on the Monday before the fair opens.
The Children’s Media Conference, a Sheffield fixture for more than two decades, is relocating to run alongside LBF on 16 and 17 March 2027.
And Deadline has revealed that MIP London, the television market RX France launched only in 2025, will not return. In its place comes MIP Talks, a two-day conference running with the fair under the theme “From IP to Fandom – and Fandom to Global Business.”
Add the new Audio Hub and a Japan market focus, and what LBF is promising for March 2027 is no longer a book fair with some fringe events. It is a five-day IP week with a book fair at its centre: Day Zero on the 15th (FutureBook, the Writers’ Summit, HP ConTEXT, IPG training), then the fair proper on the 16th to 18th, with CMC and MIP Talks layered on top.
Full disclosure: TNPS has been many things to the London Book Fair over recent years. Kind has not been one of them. So when I call this a courageous attempt at renewal, it is not politeness (when did TNPS ever do politeness?).
LBF27 is going to be a courageous gamble. Personally, I like the odds. But I’m not sure everyone will be best-pleased.
A record worth never forgetting
Long-time TNPS readers will recall the sequence. In February and March 2020, as a global pandemic took its toll, Penguin, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Ingram, HarperCollins and Hachette pulled out, LBF kept insisting the show would go on, until events made the decision for it.
It then, eventually, offered exhibitors a 60% refund and asked them to trust it again. By April 2021 TNPS was arguing that the fair had lost its credibility and that publishers should think seriously about life without Reed Exhibitions.
The problems that followed were less dramatic but no less corrosive. Directors came and went (Publishers Weekly counts Emma Lowe as the fourth since 2020, Publishing Perspectives the fifth in six, depending on where you start counting).
Olympia’s redevelopment ate the space the fair needed. In 2024 TNPS argued that the much-derided New York Times piece on LBF was mostly right about hierarchy and, above all, about the tyranny of the square metre.
In 2025 the story was that many of the best sessions were physically inaccessible to the people who had paid to attend them. The Bookseller has since reported that debris fell from the ceiling into part of the International Rights Centre. The fair that runs on trust was losing it again faster than it earned it.
Loos, queues and brews
Which is why the arrival of Emma Lowe matters. She began her career on LBF’s sales team, spent nine years as commercial director of The Bookseller, worked at Glassboxx, and was head of events at HarperCollins UK before returning to RX as director. Whatever else she is, she is not an exhibitions generalist passing through.
Her first big decision, the move to ExCeL, came with a blunt diagnosis: Olympia lost 8,000 square metres to redevelopment, the rights centre cannot add tables, meeting rooms are too few and too small, and people were being shut out of popular sessions. She has also conceded that ExCeL is not a beautiful building, only “purpose-built for scale and ambition,” and asked for patience in year one. That’s not the language of a director who pretends everything is fine. But after six years being told shit smells of roses, that alone makes Emma Lowe worth giving space to grow.
Her own summary of the job at the time was “loos, queues and brews.” Don’t sit with that thought, because you’ll sound like an AI on steroids, but the plan now on the table adds a television conference, a children’s media conference and an international FutureBook to the same building. Loos, queues and brews have just become a great deal harder to meet demand for.
Two trades, a tale of two stories
What the announcements actually mean depends on which trade press you read.
Entertainment outlets tell a story of failure and salvage. MIP London drew around 2,000 delegates in 2026, down on the debut year, and struggled in a week when distributors already host their own London Screenings events and buyer diaries are full.
MIPTV died in 2024; its London successor never found its footing. MIP Talks is a tidy retreat to a cheaper format, and to Lucy Smith’s line that IP can come from anywhere and audiences do not think in sectors.
The book trade press, by contrast, has told a story of expansion. Publishing Perspectives and Publishers Weekly reported the CMC move factually, as the latest event to join the fair, and the tone has been welcoming. That is understandable: Lowe is well-respected. One of the gang. She gets two get-out-of-jail-free cards just because she’s not an events-host outsider pretending to know publishing’s needs. Her very presence at the helm brings back fond memories of Jacks Thomas and years of LBF stability.
Except, there is no stability. The world has moved on. Frankfurt and Bologna have moved on – the latter ironically because, having left LBF, Jacks Thomas moved forward with Bologna Plus while LBF stagnated under a revolving door of no-doubt highly-competent events-managers who had likely never read a book since kindergarten, being of the generation that were encouraged by teachers to cram Cliff’s Notes.
Today it’s AI trained on Cliff’s Notes. The difference being, if someone crammed Cliff’s Notes but never read the assigned book, they were still studying. But if they use AI to revise, ask questions, challenge assumptions and better understand a text they’ve actually read, they are cheating.
But back to topic: neither camp has asked the harder questions, and that is the gap TNPS has been gnawing for the past eight years.
The book trade has always been curiously incurious about the entertainment industry it feeds. Publishers take the film, TV and games money and file it under “subsidiary rights”. The trade press rarely follows the deals into the rooms where they are made.
Even a book-gifting initiative with a royal patron and a Disney rights deal attached went largely unexamined by the trade (although TNPS gave it a fair hammering). This back before The Gambia descended into the stone age of 24/7 electricity. 247 seconds on, 24 hours seven minutes off. At least, that’s how it feels some days.
But if one useful thing comes from March 2027, it may be that the trade finally has to look the entertainment industry in the eye. Even if it’s just to say hello as they pass in the vast emptiness that is the new LBF home. So vast that it has to run four events at the same time just to cancel out the echoes.
So what’s going on? How did we arrive at the prestigious, elitist London Book Fair, home of gatekeepers and wannabe gatekeepers deciding what the great unwashed shall read in two-years-time, sharing its events hall with – pass the spittoon – TV folk?
I mean, Emma Lowe, of all people, should know that TV – and especially nasty binge-TV platforms like Netflix – have single-handedly brought publishing to its knees, just like pulp-fiction, paperbacks, online sellers, Amazon, self-publishing, ebooks, streaming, AI and anything else that threatens whatever the latest status quo may be.
For publishers in tuxedos, TV folk are a necessary evil. To be dealt with through agents’ agents, at arm’s length. Give us the rights adaptation money. Let us publish your glossy annuals and ghost-written celebrity memoirs. But don’t for one second think that watching telly and reading a real book are on par.
Yet here we are, six months from publishing’s biggest fully English-language trade fair, sharing same-day space with two – count ‘em – two telly-folk events!
What happened?
Well, it seems Emma Lowe loves herself some initials. LBF, RX, MIDEM. MIPCOM, MIPTV and RX France. In a moment, let’s try unravel that mangled tangle.
But while I as lighting candles here in the Gambian darkness, an unexpected light was shining elsewhere.
A live case from Abu Dhabi
While this piece was being drafted, a small event on the other side of the world made the same argument from the outside. On 20 September, the Congress of Arabic and Creative Industries convened in Abu Dhabi, organised by the Abu Dhabi Arabic Language Centre. It was not a book event. Its brief ran across Arabic-language publishing, audiovisual media, games, platforms, AI and cultural policy, with the entertainment side often pulling the conversation toward itself.
Reporting for Publishing Perspectives, Carlo Carrenho noted that publishing had only a light presence, both onstage and in the audience, and drew the conclusion this piece has been building toward from a different angle: “publishing has stood apart from other creative industries for too long.”
As books become entangled with IP, platforms, games, screen adaptation and AI, he argued, events outside the book trade may now have more to teach publishing than another publishing conference does.
The panel discussion was instructive on its own terms. TikTok’s regional operations lead described BookTok as having turned reading from a solitary act into a shared one, citing tens of millions of creations worldwide and, in Saudi Arabia alone, more than half a million in three months. A UNESCO chair on the creative economy observed that the sector runs on a hit rate where roughly eight attempts in ten fail, and that the job of a creative business is to organise itself to survive that ratio, not to defy it. Rana Idriss of Beirut’s Dar Al Adab was the only publisher on the main programme, and used the platform to make the case for editorial substance, language and story, when almost everyone else in the room was talking about distribution, reach and format.
None of this is about London or 2027. It is about a pattern. Publishing deliberately keeps a respectful distance from the industries that increasingly decide how its content travels, then expresses surprise when those industries redraw the map without asking.
Abu Dhabi’s congress and RX’s MIP Talks experiment are unrelated events, but they come to the same diagnosis from opposite directions: the book trade has spent too long assuming the room will wait for it.
Which takes us full-turn back to Emma Lowe’s bring-on-the-dancing-girls approach, and that cluster of initials we left a section ago.
RX France, Reed and the cost question
Are RX France and Reed Exhibitions (RX) the same thing? Same group, different divisions, since you ask. Reed Exhibitions rebranded as RX in 2021, and RX France was formed the same year from Reed Expositions France and Reed MIDEM, the business behind MIPTV and MIPCOM. LBF is part of RX’s UK operation; the MIP brands is part of RX France’s entertainment division under the IP powerhouse that is Lucy Smith.
So this is not a partnership between total strangers. Rather, it is one company moving an underperforming asset into a healthier one.
Isn’t that just cost-cutting? RX has not said so, and far be it from me to even suggest it. Oh, alright then. Consider it suggested. I mean, the arithmetic is not subtle. A standalone market in a central London hotel, pulling roughly 2,000 delegates, against a conference dropped into a fair that draws around 30,000 people and already has the venue, registration systems and sales team.
Is it strategy? Emma Lowe can hardy say it was imposed from on high, even if that were true (not saying it is, but again, consider it suggested. RX is her boss after all) but I like to think she sees real benefit – real synergies – arising from this shake-up. It may just be the best thing that ever happened to English-language publishing.
But regardless, cost-cutting and strategy are not opposites, and Lucy Smith, Director of RX France’s Entertainment Division, MIPCOM, is clearly re-engineering MIPCOM around IP and creators as well.
The point publishers should take is a different one. MIP could not attract enough buyers on its own. Fact. It is now borrowing – or at least hoping to borrow – LBF’s crowd. That’s a perfectly reasonable move for Smith, but publishers are entitled to ask what they get in return: buyers and commissioners who will sit at rights tables, or a stage full of panels? This is just six months away, remember.
And let me here note RX’s track record on patience. MIP London lasted two editions. Two! RX is not a strategy company. It’s a seize-the-day-and-worry-about-tomorrow-another-day company. A company willing to retire a flagship-adjacent brand that quickly will do the same to a conference that does not deliver. LBF’s core, the rights business, is what RX cannot afford to lose. Exhibitors should remember that this gives them leverage.
What the comparisons with Frankfurt miss
Much of the trade commentary so far looks to Bologna and Frankfurt as benchmarks.
The Bologna comparison is fair up to a point: Bologna already pairs its children’s fair with BolognaBookPlus and a licensing fair, so book, brand and screen have long shared a city. But Bologna’s spine is children’s rights, and licensing has always been native there.
LBF is adding the screen world from outside, to a fair whose identity is broader and, especially this decade, less settled.
The Frankfurt comparison is where the commentary goes haywire, because it treats Frankfurt as a static benchmark. It is not. Frankfurt is in the middle of the biggest reorganisation in years, and it points in the complete opposite direction from LBF’s.
Two separate things are happening in downtown München. First, the planned redesign: from 2026, exhibitors with a B2B focus sit on the upper hall levels, public-facing exhibitors on the ground levels.
The stated reasons are candid. Public visitors on the Friday were making professional meetings difficult, and areas such as New Adult were isolated from the rest of the fair. Trade goes up, public goes down, and there is a stage in every hall.
Second, and less well understood, the forced change. Publishers Weekly reports that Juergen Boos learned in July that Hall 6, home to international publishers since 1963, had a structural problem and would have to close. Around 500 publishers had to be moved to Hall 4.2, and the roughly 600 people in the Literary Agents & Scouts Centre and Publishers Rights Centre relocated.
Exhibitors, it seems, have warmed to the result. Time will tell if that faith is justified.
It is also Boos’s last fair before Joachim Kaufmann of Carlsen takes over.
But Frankfurt is not ignoring the entertainment economy. Its Audio Business Centre will host Audible, ElevenLabs and Spotify alongside start-ups from Africa, Asia and Latin America, comics get an expanded pavilion, and the Frankfurt Kids Conference returns for a third edition.
The difference is architecture. Frankfurt is absorbing adjacent industries into a floor plan that protects (hopefully) the trade’s business.
LBF is bringing in whole conferences from other industries with their own audiences, and will have to build the equivalent protection deliberately (and quickly).
There is a further lesson. Even an event of Frankfurt’s stature had to improvise its floor plan at a few months’ notice. Nobody in this business has all the answers, which is a reason for humility on all sides, and – memo to Emma Lowe – for LBF to publish its floor plan early.
Can ExCeL cope? That’s not the question we need to be asking
On raw capacity, ExCeL can cope. Of course. It’s cavernous, and thirty-odd thousand publishers are going to rattle about like marbles in a biscuit tin. The 2006 experiment, which ended in a retreat to Earls Court in 2007, is a useful ghost to keep in mind, but transport has changed and the venue has been extended.
The real questions today are about design and about people.
Design first. The fair’s problem at Olympia was too little room. At ExCeL it could become too much undifferentiated room, with a rights market, a children’s TV conference, a fandom summit and an audio hub all sharing corridors. Zoning, acoustics and signage will decide whether it feels like one fair or four.
People next. Five days in the London Docklands is a serious commitment for small independents, and CMC’s freelancers and small producers, who valued a summer event in Sheffield precisely because it was cheap and focused, will struggle with March in a costalopolis like London. I suspect some of what made CMC special may not survive the move.
The dilution question
Will the traditional books-focused fair be diluted? Yes, in one sense – books stop being the only product on the floor.
And that is either Emma Lowe’s vision in agreeing to this, or the biggest challenge she faces, if RX forced this on her.
But whether this is dilution or extension depends on who is in the room. If the screen buyers who turn up are the people who acquire, option and commission, then the fair has become more valuable to the publishers who exhibit. If they are brand managers and platform marketers looking for conference audiences, it has become noisier.
There is also an uncomfortable truth (sorry – AI high-frequency term – but appropriate) in the traditional publishing attitude. Books are special, we say, and most of us believe it, but publishing has always been happy to take screen money.
Maybe Emma Lowe’s take here is that the credible answer to condescension is not to keep the screen industry away. It is to arrive at the table with rights held, priced and understood. Publishers who treat adaptation as a windfall will find that they are being treated as a supplier. Publishers who treat it as a business will reap the benefits.
What success might look like
So what would count as success in March 2027?
A rights centre that is quieter, bigger and better connected than it was at Olympia. Screen and games buyers visible at rights tables and not only on stages. A floor plan published early, with clear zoning. Day Zero that frames the week instead of exhausting it. And, crucially, some data afterwards: how many cross-sector meetings took place, who made them, and what came of them. Without numbers, the synergy story is just a story.
Lowe deserves the benefit of the doubt, and the trade should give it to her. I certainly am. The trade will anyway, because she’s one of us.
But the benefit of the doubt is not a business plan. For a fair that has spent six years having to explaining why it can be trusted, March 2027 is the chance to demonstrate it.
The gamble is real, but so is the opportunity. TNPS will be watching from afar (seeing the wood / forest for the trees, anybody?), as it always has, and this time I’m really hoping to write something positive.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Analysis newsletter.
