The first panel of the 2026 Frankfurt Book Fair took on the question that hangs over much of the industry: will AI take your job? “It’s rubbish, of course!” Bloomsbury founder Nigel Newton said.
The October 7 session, “The Future Skills for Publishing Professionals,” brought together Newton, Supadu president Sarah Arbuthnot, and Suzanne Collier, founder of bookcareers.com and author of How to Job Search in Book Publishing. Prashant Pathak, publishing services manager for the Sharjah Book Authority, moderated. All three panelists agreed that AI would reshape publishing work rather than eliminate it. They warned that entry-level jobs may disappear and employers must take responsibility for retraining staff.
Every major technology of the past century has seemed to threaten the book, Newton argued, and almost every one “seemed as significant and earth-shattering at the time as AI does to us today.” Rather than killing reading, almost every one “has turned out to stimulate further book sales.” Film and television, the internet, e-books and audio all fit that pattern. Audio alone has carried books into the gym, the commute and the kitchen. “I’m absolutely confident that AI will be the same,” Newton said.
Collier was skeptical of the forecasts behind the fear. “I’m still waiting for the paperless office.” Drawing on U.S. job data she has been tracking, she noted that the people claiming AI replaces jobs are mostly “the companies that are selling AI agents.” In her account, AI is simply the latest excuse for layoffs, following Brexit, Covid, “and any war that you care to mention.” Often those layoffs come from companies covering for their own poor performance.
Entry-level work was a bigger worry for Collier than outright job losses. AI will not eliminate jobs, in her view, but employers now have a responsibility to train people so they can reskill. Her own career began at the bottom, doing data entry all day. That experience led her to ask how young people will learn the business if those jobs vanish.
Retraining is partly the publisher’s job, Newton agreed, and that means teaching staff how AI applies to specific tasks. “A great deal of publishing is kind of drudgery,” he said, pointing to data inputting. As he sees it, the likely future is one in which “the same people can do their jobs better.” At Bloomsbury, several AI roles have been created, and no one has lost a job because of AI.
For individuals, his advice was to “walk towards the fire” and learn as much as possible about AI, starting with personal use. By his own admission, he consults ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude “20 times a day.”
New roles, old skills
According to Arbuthnot, new hybrid positions could emerge, such as a metadata marketing specialist or an editorial and metadata specialist. Among the publishers Supadu works with, those functions are still handled sporadically. Audience and consumer-insights managers are another growth area. “You can use the technology to be more creative,” Arbuthnot said.
In Collier’s view, three skills will matter most. First is critical thinking, in a world of misinformation and AI hallucinations. Second is problem solving. “Many people look at the tech and say, ‘where can we use AI?'” Collier said. The better question is what problems need solving and where the bottlenecks are. Only then should people look for technology that helps. Third is entrepreneurship: “We need to be initiating change, creating change instead of coping with it.”
As AI spreads, Collier said, “human interaction is going to increase in value.” DK recently added a regional sales manager, and she wondered whether that reflects hand selling becoming more important as algorithms take over. New roles overseeing compliance are also likely to emerge. Staff continues to be overextended. “I don’t currently see anybody in publishing doing the work of less than three people anyway,” she said.
The panelists also defended the role of humanities graduates in feeding the book business. Newton is campaigning for the continued study of English literature, a subject he said is under threat as governments cut humanities funding. The University of Exeter, for one, cut 40% of its English department in August. English, he argued, is “the perfect skill set for leaders in the AI era” because it builds empathy and communication skills. Financial executives, he added, have also said they are looking for English literature graduates. Meanwhile, the number of independent bookshops in the UK is rising. He sees that as part of a broader embrace of “the human side of creativity and the love of the physical object.”
Pathak asked whether today’s anxiety over AI resembles the panic in 2008 over the introduction of e-books, when people feared the end of print. The analogy fits, Newton said, because the impact of innovation tends to be overestimated in the short term. He once told Bloomsbury shareholders that e-books would eventually account for more than 50% of sales. Instead, the share stopped rising at around 25%–30%. A backlash is already building against AI, he said, “People are asking, ‘Where are the changes we were promised?”