Predictions: what lies ahead for the book trade in 2026?
- David Salariya
- Jan 2
- 9 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
Consulting the Oracle and Reading the Chicken Livers: What 2026 Holds for Publishing
I must applaud The Bookseller for assembling so many high priests from publishing in one place. If you listen carefully, you can hear the collective rustle of lanyards, the soft chime of stakeholder CEO language (perhaps committee consulted), and the distant, comforting moo of the cash-cow backlist.
What you have here is not a set of predictions. It’s a group therapy circle in which everyone agrees the building is on fire, and then spends 700 words discussing the branding of the bucket.
Predictions
The Roman haruspex would have recognised the technique immediately: speak in omens, avoid numbers, and never - under any circumstances - name the sacrifice.
The ancient Romans, sensible people when not conquering Gaul or dying their hair with leeches rotting in vinegar, believed the future could be read in the entrails of chickens. Livers, specifically. If the markings were favourable, you advanced. If not, you delayed. The crucial point is this: no one mistook divination for certainty. The ritual was about judgement, not prediction.
Roman divination was not fortune-telling in the modern sense. The haruspex examined the liver of a sacrificed chicken because it was believed to reflect cosmic order - not because it dictated outcomes. An unfavourable sign did not forbid action; it advised delay, caution, or reconsideration. The decision still belonged to human judgement.
The ancient Greeks, for their part, were equally pragmatic. They consulted oracles not because they were fools, but because the world was complex, power was fragile, and certainty was a dangerous illusion. Delphi did not hand out business plans. It offered ambiguity, warning, and perspective. Multiple futures. Choose carefully.
Publishing enters 2026 in much the same spirit, though without the incense.
The publishing industry’s recent spate of predictions - earnest, optimistic, carefully hedged - reads less like forecasting and more like augury: leaders gazing into the smoke and describing what they hope to see. AI will clarify. Audio will grow. Reading will revive. Children will return. Design will save us. The gods, apparently, are bullish.
But as any Roman haruspex would tell you: the liver must be read whole.
The omens on the table
If we lay out the signs collectively, a pattern emerges - not of collapse, but of strain.
There is unanimity about the problems:
declining reading for pleasure, especially among children;
the doom scrolling grinding concentration into dust;
AI racing ahead of governance;
cultural polarisation and mistrust of information;
margin pressure across retail and libraries.
And there is near-unanimity about the remedies:
meet readers where they are;
go “all in” on the National Year of Reading;
lean into formats (audio, graphic novels, collectable books);
defend human creativity while using machine efficiency;
build communities, not just lists.
None of this is wrong. But nor is it particularly prophetic.
What it reveals instead is an industry that senses - correctly - that the old instruments no longer work, but has not yet agreed on what replaces them.
The oracle speaks in contradictions
The Delphic oracle was famous for ambiguity because ambiguity forces responsibility back onto the listener.
So too with publishing in 2026.
We are told:
AI is both existential threat and productivity miracle.
Reading is declining, yet bookshops are thriving as cultural spaces.
Discovery is broken, yet bestsellers are more concentrated than ever.
Authority is mistrusted, yet publishers are asked to be guardians of truth.
Inclusivity is a core value, yet access to publishing remains stubbornly stratified by class and geography.
These are not hypocrisies. They are tensions. And tensions, historically, are where systems either adapt or harden.
The danger is not that publishing is wrong about the future.The danger is that it keeps mistaking hope for strategy.
HR language, priestly language
One striking feature of the publishings current rhetoric is its adoption of moral and pastoral language.
Wellbeing, Care, Community, Values, Trust, Safety.
These are noble concerns. But, as with religion, language without structure becomes ritual.
Publishing increasingly sounds like an institution that wants the authority of priesthood without the discipline of canon law. It speaks of care while relying on discretion. It invokes values while avoiding codified process. It makes judgments - sometimes necessary ones - without architecture robust enough to sustain trust.
The Romans, at least, wrote things down.
This matters because trust, once lost, does not return through declarations. It returns through procedure. Through fairness that survives discomfort. Through systems that work even when reputations are at stake.
If 2026 teaches publishing anything, it should be this:values without process curdle into theatre.
The National Year of Reading: miracle or mirror?
The National Year of Reading is publishing’s most cherished omen. A rare alignment of government, publishers, booksellers, libraries and charities. A chance to reverse a twenty-year slide.
It may succeed. It may even be transformative.
But ancient history again offers a caution. Public rituals work only when they reflect underlying reality. A festival cannot substitute for infrastructure. A campaign cannot replace libraries. A slogan cannot undo curriculum pressure, screen addiction, or social inequality.
If the Year of Reading becomes a mirror - revealing where systems fail, where access collapses, where joy is strangled by assessment - it will be invaluable.
If it becomes a talisman waved against uncomfortable truths, it will fade quietly by Easter.
What the entrails really say
If we read the signs honestly, the future being offered is not one of technological triumph or cultural doom, but of institutional adolescence.
Publishing is being asked to grow up.
To move from:
discretion to governance,
proximity to accountability,
taste to explanation,
optimism to resilience.
The Ancient Greeks knew that prophecy was dangerous because it tempted rulers to believe the future belonged to them.
The wiser lesson was always that choice still mattered.
So too here.
2026 will not be saved by AI, audio, BookTok, or the third Gruffalo. Nor will it be destroyed by them.
It will be shaped by whether publishing can do something profoundly unglamorous:build structures worthy of the moral authority it claims.
What the CEOs Can’t Say Out Loud
1) “Meet readers where they are.”Translation: “We will follow the algorithm into the swamp and call it a strategy.”TikTok Shop, subscription boxes, “new channels” - all true, all necessary, all faintly desperate. When executives say evolving with audiences, what they mean is “the old routes to attention have collapsed, and we are rebuilding the road while driving down it.”
2) “AI will help discovery, marketing, workflows… but also we defend human creativity.” Translation: “We want productivity gains, and we also want absolution.”Notice the recurring hymn: AI as miracle, AI as menace, “framework”, “transparency.”
That’s not a position; it’s a prayer for a future in which everyone gets what they want and no one gets sued.
The article in The Bookseller repeatedly performs the same ceremonial gesture:
We will use AI everywhere internally.
We will oppose AI everywhere externally.
We will label something, eventually.
We will keep the moral high ground while cashing the efficiency dividend.
A Roman would call this reading the liver with one eye on the treasury.
3) “National Year of Reading.”Translation: “We badly need a shared narrative that isn’t ‘kids don’t read anymore’.”Everyone clings to it because it’s one of the few things in the room that looks like agency. But the subtext is brutal: a campaign cannot replace infrastructure. You can’t hashtag your way out of library attrition, exam pressure, inequality, exhausted teachers, and phones designed by neuroscientists to eat childhood.
The Year of Reading is being treated like a talisman.
4) “Beautiful books / book nooks / collectability / premium.” Translation: “We’re selling objects harder because attention is fleeting.”This is one of the clearest tells in the whole piece. Books are not only books now - they’re décor, gifts, proof of taste, social furniture. That’s not automatically a sin… but it’s a sign the culture is shifting from reading as habit to books as identity props.
And yes, it’s commercially clever. And yes, it’s also a little bit like selling umbrellas during a flood.
5) “Misinformation / authenticated facts / trusted bastion of truth.” Translation: “We would like to borrow moral authority from institutions that still have procedures.”Everybody wants to be the guardian of truth. Few mention the unglamorous part: trust is built by process, not proclamation. It’s hard to sound like the last honest shop on the street while your industry is simultaneously:
tightening margins,
concentrating risk,
outsourcing judgement to data,
and quietly replacing craft with throughput.
Priestly language is everywhere: values, care, community, integrity.But where are the mechanisms? Where are the enforceable standards? Where is the due process that survives reputational panic?
6) “Global mindset / cross-media IP / stories across platforms.”Translation: “Books are becoming upstream content.”This is the most honest thread: publishing increasingly sees itself as the first stage in a larger IP pipeline - games, film, immersive, audio, merchandise, “experiences”. Again: not evil. But it does tilt the centre of gravity away from literature and toward extractable property.
When someone says books are gateways, the author becomes - at best - a partner, and at worst - a content donor.
7) “English-language export rising in Europe.”Translation: “The empire is back, but with ISBNs.”That section is fascinating because it admits something nobody likes to say out loud: English is a platform advantage, and it distorts local ecosystems. Note the polite tone (“keep an eye on”) - the diplomatic equivalent of spotting a crack in the dam and offering the dam a mindfulness app.
8) The agents’ section is the real oracle. The CEOs speak in aspiration. The agents speak in market weather. Here the entrails are fresher:
memoir caution (risk + lawsuits + fatigue),
“need-based” non-fiction (buying urgency),
genre dominance (romantasy, SFF, horror variants),
discoverability terror,
“brand publishing” rising,
special editions to justify price.
Less Ultra Processed Publishing
Ingredients List: (May Contain Authors and illustrators)
The ancient Romans, having peered at the liver, were expected to act more wisely thereafter. The Greeks, having heard the oracle, understood that ambiguity was a warning, not an excuse.
Publishing, having consulted the forecasts, - there are a few things I might hope to see less of in the coming year:
Less publishing designed backwards from the spreadsheet. If a book exists only because three comparables sold well in Q3 and a platform algorithm twitched encouragingly, it is not a vision. It is a derivative.
Less invisible labour. Ghost authors treated as ingredients. Editors as throughput managers. Designers as surface decorators. Culture does not thrive when its makers are quietly erased from the work.
Less IP masquerading as literature. Books conceived primarily as “gateways”, "gifts"(especially for children) “feedstock”, or “adaptation-ready assets” tend to forget the inconvenient business of being read.
Less moral language doing the work of governance. Values are admirable. Procedures are indispensable. Trust does not survive on aspiration alone.
Less ritualised optimism. Hope is not a strategy, and confidence is not evidence. The oracle never promised comfort - only clarity.
Less speed mistaken for relevance. A culture fed exclusively on immediacy eventually loses the appetite for thought.
And perhaps, if the entrails are read whole:
More publishing that remembers books are created from seeds of ideas, developed and grown, not assembled or remade from a change of fonts and presented as the "start of an idea". That readers are cultivated, not captured. And that authors and illustrators are not flavouring - they are the source.
Bible Sales are Rising
One of the more awkward signs in the entrails is this: Bible sales are rising sharply. Research by SPCK Group, drawing on Nielsen BookScan, shows religious nonfiction growing by 11% in 2025, up from 6% the year before. This is not nostalgia buying, nor purely institutional demand. A 2025 report from the Bible Society links the trend to a 50% rise in church attendance in England and Wales since 2018, driven most strikingly by young adults: monthly attendance among 18-24-year-olds has quadrupled in six years. The Roman haruspex would recognise the pattern immediately. When societies become unstable, people do not always seek novelty; they seek structure. They return to texts that promise coherence, moral architecture, and continuity across time. In publishing terms, this is an uncomfortable omen: while the leader's talk relentlessly about speed, frictionless discovery and “meeting readers where they are,” a growing cohort of readers appear to be moving in the opposite direction - towards slower reading, inherited frameworks, and a book that does not apologise for seriousness.
A final, unfashionable thought
The future of publishing will not be decided by algorithms, or even by readers alone.
It will be decided by whether publishing can tolerate slower decisions, clearer rules, and fewer performances of certainty.
The oracle has spoken - as it always does - in riddles.
The giblets do not say “everything will be fine.”They say: “Proceed carefully. Reform your instruments. The gods will not do this for you.”
The ancients would have understood that perfectly.
So Happy New year with less chicken livers.
.About David Salariya
David Salariya is an author, illustrator and publisher with over forty years’ experience making books. Founder of The Salariya Book Company, he created internationally published series including You Wouldn’t Want to Be… and A Very Peculiar History. He writes about publishing not as a futurist, but as a practitioner - observing how systems, incentives and technology quietly reshape authorship, reading and trust.
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