The future of book publishing – 2026 and beyond

This is the third time I sit down at the start of the year and look at how book publishing has changed in recent years and what might lie ahead. This is, by necessity, a short-term outlook looking only a few years ahead but focuses on the ten major trends and how they might reshape publishing long-term. However, at the end, I take a long-term look at what would happen if super-intelligence were to emerge and how this would reshape the publishing industry we can barely even imagine.

AI, audiobooks, and technology continue to be major forces reshaping the book industry, but there are also changes in the marketplace afoot that I will look at more closely. These include shrinking audiences, the rise of compliance, the evolving audiobook market, the need for scale, and social media. Notable trends also include the rise of webtoons and Korean pop culture in general.

Surveys by various publisher associations have shown that AI has embedded itself deeply into publishing workflows, including audiobook creation, editorial, cover design, translations, marketing, and sales forecasting. There is still room for a lot of growth, innovation, and disappointment in this area.

The use of copyrighted content without permission continues to be a major issue in publishing. Some publishers, especially academic publishers, are aggressively seeking licensing deals, while others, especially authors, are pursuing litigation. Lawsuits have not always gone in favour of litigants, though. US judges have frequently ruled that AI is transformative use protected under the US “fair use” doctrine. Copyright specialists and lawyers will continue to make hay for years to come.

A case study from South Korea shows that current AI tools are not yet fit for purpose when it comes to creating textbooks and educational materials from scratch using AI, and this applies to the wider world of publishing as well. AI is not yet capable of writing book-length content with the skill and authority of a human writer, not yet at least.

The gap between cheap paperbacks, ebooks, and audiobooks versus premium hardbacks and audiobooks is rising. This is dividing the market into a value segment of mass market, easily consumed, disposable content for reading, and a premium segment of cherished, collectible high-end products. The rise of AI and technology is likely to widen this gap rather than narrow it, as this section will explain.

A worrying trend is the rise in children and adults alike who are functionally illiterate.

This was first observed in the form of declining readership among children, but is also spreading to adults, thus shrinking the market for books in the Western world.

A temporary offsetting trend is the rising literacy and spending power of consumers in developing countries across Asia and Africa, but many of these new readers may well leapfrog directly to audiobooks, ebooks, and webtoons that they read, view, and listen to on their smartphones.

Audiobooks continue to boom, but AI is having a major impact in bringing production costs down. Lower costs lead to lower prices for machine-generated audiobooks. Improved affordability means books are reaching new audiences and listeners, including those in non-traditional markets, benefiting the industry as a whole.

The year 2025 has been an outstanding year for Korean pop culture. Demon Hunters took the world by storm. In publishing, it is the continued rise of not only South Korean literature in translation, but the rise of webtoons that is particularly notable. This highly accessible graphic format developed for smartphones is capturing the attention of young readers but also spilling over into the print market.

The landmark legislation of 2025 was the European Accessibility Act (EEA) coming into force in June 2025, while publishing was, after much meandering and delay, exempted from the requirements of the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR).

The road to more accessible books will continue with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Title II next year and the rise of accessibility legislation across the world.

At the same time, book bans and new forms of censorship will increasingly impact how books are marketed and distributed. Call it twenty-first century censorship if you may. It is censorship that is not based on the whims of a human regulator, but censorship based on filters, algorithms, and other technology-based gatekeepers deciding what can be shown to whom.

The compliance officer, long a staple of the banking, insurance, and utility sector, may increasingly become a role we may see in publishing houses, too.

The scraping of copyrighted content on a massive scale by large tech companies has shown that the existing rights framework is broken in terms of speed and scale.

While the era of LLM training is mostly over, the issue will continue to fox the industry as AI impacts workflows such as translation, audiobook narration, cover creation, new content formats such as interactive audiobooks, and much more. A faster and more efficient rights and licensing regime that can operate at scale is needed.

Technology is expensive and displays scale effects at many levels, favouring consolidation in the industry and the growth of ever larger publishing conglomerates.

Publishers forming the equivalent of cooperatives is an antidote to the industry fusing into a small handful of mega-corporations.

The influence of Instagram and TikTok on book publishing has been well recognised, but other forms of communication such as WhatsApp, podcasting, and YouTube are increasingly shaping how people talk about books.

Publishers also need to rethink their approach to earned media versus owned and paid media. How books are discovered is forever evolving.

Finally, I shall return to the topic of AI once more, but not AI as we know it, but AI as a form of superintelligence that can write novel-length books and how this may fundamentally reshape book publishing as we know it. The implications are likely to be profound. AGI could be a true turning point for the industry on par with the invention of the printing press.