<p>Joanna Prior, CEO of Pan Macmillan and chair of the National Literacy Trust, used her keynote address at the London Book Fair on Wednesday to deliver what may prove to be the most consequential provocation of this year's event. "The decline of reading is a greater challenge to our industry than AI could ever be," she told a packed mainstage audience. "AI changes how we work. But the reading crisis changes whether we have a business at all." The statement was not rhetorical flourish — it was a diagnosis backed by data that the publishing industry has been reluctant to confront directly while fixating on the more dramatic spectacle of generative AI.</p><p>The numbers Prior cited are stark. Only one in three children in the United Kingdom enjoy reading in their free time. Half of UK adults have stopped reading regularly. Daily reading with children aged zero to five has fallen 25 percent since 2019. Prior drew on Oxford professor Jonathan Bate's observation that university students who once read three books a week now struggle to finish one in three weeks, and she characterised the shift as neurological rather than merely cultural. "This isn't a lack of intellect," she said. "It's a neurological shift. We are witnessing a generation rewired for the scroll over the page." Fresh from an AI summit in San Francisco, Prior said she returned neither as a convert nor a luddite, but with a sharpened conviction that the industry is misallocating its anxiety.</p><p>Prior's argument carries particular weight because she is not dismissing AI — she is recontextualising it. The industry's preoccupation with what machines can generate, she suggested, has blinded publishers to the more fundamental problem of shrinking audiences. If the pool of habitual readers continues to contract, the question of whether AI writes the next bestseller becomes academic. Her call to action was correspondingly ambitious: publishers must "make the book as accessible, as urgent, and as socially relevant as the notification," and must deploy AI's scale and reach not merely to trim costs but as "an engine for growth" — using data to identify what people are passionate about and map pathways toward longer-form reading.</p><p>The practical proposals Prior outlined are worth taking seriously. She pointed to Pan Macmillan's partnership with the Multibank charity — which distributes books alongside basic household essentials to families in need — as a model for the kind of third-sector collaboration the industry must pursue at scale. She called on publishing staff to volunteer in communities, urged the industry to treat literacy as a collective mission rather than a competitive advantage, and suggested that technology could lower barriers to reading by building entry points from football scores, recipes, and gaming content. The goal, she said, is a sustained, inclusive reading culture by 2035 — a timeline that implies structural investment rather than campaign-level intervention.</p><p>What makes Prior's keynote significant beyond its content is its timing. The London Book Fair has been dominated this year by AI copyright battles, rights disputes, and technology strategy sessions. Prior's intervention is a reminder that all of those debates are downstream of a more basic question: who will be reading the books that publishers produce? The industry's advocacy for the next generation, she closed, "must be as relentless as the algorithms we are competing with." That is a challenge that no technology strategy, however sophisticated, can substitute for.</p>