London Fair spotlights AI

At the 2026 London Book Fair, artificial intelligence moved from a novelty pitch to a workflow debate about editing, rights, and accessibility. (sixredmarbles.com) The fair ran March 10 to 12 at Olympia London, drew 1,005 exhibitors and more than 33,000 visitors, and marked the last London Book Fair at Olympia before the move to Excel London in 2027. (rxglobal.com) London Book Fair’s 2026 program put those issues on the schedule in plain sight: the official seminar lineup listed technology sessions in the Tech Theatre, a one-day Academic and Professional Publishing Conference on March 12, and more than 100 sessions across three days. (londonbookfair.co.uk) (knowledgespeak.com) Six Red Marbles, a publishing services company that exhibited at the fair, said publishers were asking less about flashy uses of artificial intelligence and more about reducing repetitive work, tightening review processes, and delivering content in accessible formats without adding manual steps. (sixredmarbles.com) That emphasis matched the wider conference agenda. Publishing Perspectives’ preview said the March 10 to 12 program would cover artificial intelligence, rights and licensing, digital audio, translation, and international market trends, rather than treating technology as a side topic. (publishingperspectives.com) Accessibility was not a separate niche conversation. Inclusive Publishing highlighted a March 12 session, “Ready or Not: Accessibility Legislation in US and EU and What Publishers Must Know,” focused on compliance gaps and practical steps for publishers selling into both markets. (inclusivepublishing.org) The pressure behind that discussion is operational as much as legal: publishers now have to make ebooks, educational materials, and digital products usable for readers with disabilities, which means alt text, navigable files, and cleaner production workflows built in earlier. Six Red Marbles said visitors were looking for ways to make that work “at scale,” not as a last-minute manual fix. (sixredmarbles.com) The fair also showed how divided the industry remains on artificial intelligence. Six Red Marbles argued for “human oversight” and editorial control, while authors used the event to stage a copyright protest against unlicensed training data. (sixredmarbles.com) (euronews.com) That protest, built around an “empty” book called *Don’t Steal This Book*, involved about 10,000 authors objecting to proposals that would make it easier to train artificial intelligence models on copyrighted work without a license. (societyofauthors.org) (thebookseller.com) Even executives speaking from the main stage framed artificial intelligence as a boundary question. In the opening keynote on March 11, Penguin Random House United Kingdom chief executive Tom Weldon discussed artificial intelligence alongside rights and geopolitics, underscoring how closely the technology debate now sits to core publishing business. (publishingperspectives.com) By the end of the fair, the industry’s argument was less about whether artificial intelligence will enter publishing and more about where publishers will permit it into the chain from manuscript to finished product. London’s biggest spring book trade event spent three days treating that as a production problem, a legal problem, and an access problem at the same time. (publishingperspectives.com) (sixredmarbles.com)