The most consequential AI deployment in publishing this year is not a chatbot answering reader queries or an algorithmic marketing tool optimising social spend. It is quieter, and it sits at the heart of the house: inside…
Every few years the rights market anoints a new corner of the map as its hunting ground, and this autumn the scouts have converged, almost to a person, on the same coordinates. Scandinavian crime fiction — never…
Six weeks before the doors open, the organising team behind the Guadalajara International Book Fair is finalising a floor plan that tells a story about where Spanish-language publishing is heading. The 2026 edition, which runs in late…
The punch card had a good run. For two decades the loyalty industry’s answer to the independent bookshop was a paper rectangle and a promise: buy nine books, get the tenth free. New data gathered across several…
For most of publishing’s modern history, the audiobook was an afterthought — a subsidiary right handed to a publisher’s audio division in the same bundle as print and ebook, often for an advance that barely registered on…
The property pages have been running a story that the book trade should read carefully: high street rents, after two punishing years of post-pandemic catch-up increases, are softening. Not collapsing — softening. And into that modest relaxation…
The standard trajectory of a literary debut was written long ago: publish at home, hope for reviews, pray for a foreign sale or two to trickle in from scouts who noticed. That sequence is now being negotiated…
The industry’s favourite doomsday scenario has been postponed again. Half-year figures gathered across the major trade markets show print unit sales holding essentially level against 2025 — a flat line that, after the turbulence of the past…
For a century the economics of the hardback have rested on a single assumption: volume. Case binding rewarded scale so ruthlessly that a print run below four figures was not a product but a problem — something…
Ask anyone who has launched a book what the true bottleneck was, and they will rarely mention printing. They will mention metadata: the forty, sixty, sometimes eighty discrete fields that must be correct before a title can…
