We’re All on the Same Page (Citation Needed)

The 2024 London Book Fair took place last month at the 3Olympia, a building undergoing extensive renovation. If you ever wandered away from the fair you just had to look for the cranes towering over the arena or follow the sound of construction to find your way back, and in hindsight these external changes mirrored the shifts taking place indoors.

I enjoyed my time at the LBF – I learned a lot about the inner workings of the field, met some lovely independent publishers and had fun wandering the nearby areas of Hammersmith. I mainly spent my time engaging with panel discussions, but though I generally felt the speakers were well-informed and engaging, I did sense an underlying uncertainty regarding the future of the industry. This was the first major conference I attended and with an event this size there is always bound to be a diversity of thought on display, but the fair didn’t present as cohesive an identity as I expected. There is no doubt that reaction to this year’s fair has been positive, and commercially the LBF was very successful – attendance of ‘some 30,000’ was ‘on par with pre-pandemic levels.’ Several major rights deals were signed, and a ‘buoyant tone and energy’ pervaded all three days (Anderson, 2024). But several of the events were underpinned by a tension between expectation and reality which stuck with me after my trip, and part of the reason I waited to write about the fair was to gauge the media reaction and see if my experience was mirrored elsewhere.

I queued for half an hour on the first day of the fair, sitting on the floor alongside dozens of others to attend Free Expression and Protecting the Right to Dissent, a panel discussion on worrying trends regarding prevailing expectations in the sector. The panellists felt an atmosphere of pressure closing in, where censorship was not yet explicit but under which it was becoming unsafe to speak out against the mainstream. This is a fascinating and important topic, but I felt the point was undercut by panellist Nick Barley’s discussion of the arrest and silencing of journalists in China which he compared to the pressure he faced while organising the Edinburgh International Book Festival to take a public stance on the Scottish independence referendum. These issues didn’t feel like they bore comparison and lent the talk a narrative dissonance that I couldn’t quite ignore.

Likewise, on Wednesday this same feeling pervaded AI and Literary Translation, a panel talk about the rising influence of AI in the publishing industry. The panellists spoke about the replacement of human creativity with machine learning, and the pitfalls of allowing this technology to run unchecked throughout the sector. Though panellist Acya Turkoglu gave an impassioned defence of the necessity of ‘human creativity [which] adds joy and pleasure to people’s lives’, Nicola Solomon walked back the point by comparing the backlash against AI to that of typewriters, arguing that when the latter was invented, ‘some people said we shouldn’t accept typewritten work because it wasn’t a human creation.’ Despite the major focus on AI during the conference I found the response a little hesitant, and I’m not sure this is something we can afford against a force that threatens to change the face of the industry.

Several other events also contributed to this year’s strangely broken sense of identity. Perhaps most egregious was Voices Unheard: Addressing Inclusivity and Representation in Publishing World, which spoke about the crisis men are facing in publishing – the current statistic of about two-thirds female employment apparently representing a male deficit that must be rectified, despite the fact, as one panellist pointed out, that no such action was deemed necessary when the statistics were reversed in the 90s. A dichotomy was evident even in the fair’s marketing – it was ‘not targeted at readers, writers and even translators, despite the seminar programme it has put together’ (Sofia, 2024). Rosa Lyster of the New York Times was especially critical of an overall atmosphere she felt was disingenuous – ‘it no longer seems to be enough for an agent to say that they love a book. They must be in love with it,’ she notes. She also observed more than one false smile (2024).

I perhaps wouldn’t go quite that far. Maybe some uncertainty is to be expected – after all, ‘to take risks… is becoming ever more crucial in an industry that is in a never-ending state of change’ (de Chamberet, 2024), and failure in this sort of environment is a constant possibility. To judge the event based on economic factors, this year’s fair was a resounding success. But just like the building that hosted it, there may be some holes that still need patched up.