If the TikTok drama has done one thing, it has been to keep AI stories at bay. Though the news that tech giants are combining their efforts behind a $500 billion new AI venture unpretentiously monikered Stargate won’t have gone unnoticed. But AI is definitely not off the menu for 2025. We learned this week that the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the event that traditionally kicks off the global conference calendar, will be scheduling in a whole day for an AI Summit. Astute observers and satirists alike will no doubt have noted with wry interest that the event is timetabled for April 1st.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
‘Strategic adoption of AI'
Porter Anderson has some interesting notes on the not yet fully disclosed content of the summit over at Publishing Perspectives. The pickings I take from that are that, yes, a lot of this is about copyright protection, as we might expect. But a lot of the agenda will be accepting of a landscape that has now changed, and figuring out how we as creatives can thrive within it, hence a note on “strategic adoption of AI.”
News of the key names and faces at London Book Fair, which follows hot on Bologna’s heels, is also starting to leak out. And it seems that attempts to hold a major global conference without Barnes & Noble’s omnipresent CEO James Daunt are still falling at an early hurdle.
TikTok Drama
Which brings me back to where I came in, kind of, because the TikTok drama has unsurprisingly caused some swift reflection from a book industry that has had reason to get excited in recent years. Daunt has acknowledged that BookTok has helped greatly in the relative recent health of Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, and actually puts the situation the industry faces quite well: “It’s not like BookTok invented great books, though it does provide a great platform to find them.”
I am less convinced than he is, though, that if TikTok disappeared another platform would seamlessly take its place. I don’t like telling fans what they should and shouldn’t do. I do believe in organic, grassroots growth of fan communities. But I also think “it’ll be fine” is a risky stance. Which is one of the reasons I became and stay an indie.
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