Joanna Prior, CEO of Pan Macmillan and chair of the National Literacy Trust, used a keynote address at the London Book Fair on Wednesday to argue that the publishing industry is prioritizing the wrong crisis.

"The decline of reading is a greater challenge to our industry than AI could ever be," Prior told a packed mainstage audience. "AI changes how we work. But the reading crisis changes whether we have a business at all."

Fresh from an AI Summit in San Francisco, Prior said she had returned as neither convert nor as a luddite. Rather, she said, she came away from the event with a sharpened conviction that publishers are "obsessing over the machine's ability to write while ignoring the audience's fading ability to read."

The numbers, she argued, bear that out: only one in three children in the U.K. enjoy reading in their free time, and half of U.K. adults have stopped reading regularly. Daily reading with children aged zero to five has fallen 25% since 2019.

"We have seen children arriving at the school gate who don't even know what a book is, let alone how to turn the pages," she said.

The problem, in Prior's telling, is neurological as much as cultural. Citing Oxford professor Jonathan Bate's observation that university students who once read three books a week now struggle to finish one in three weeks, she argued the industry is confronting something more serious than shifting tastes.

"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."

That shift, Prior argued, carries consequences well beyond the book trade. In a world of AI-generated content and deepfakes, she said, reading comprehension is "our only collective defense." A coordinated global surge in book bans, she added, is evidence that narrowing the mind is a deliberate strategy—making literacy the primary tool for child safety in a digital environment. "The only real safeguard is an independent mind," she said.

The industry's response, she said, must start with a fundamental reframing of its relationship with technology.

"We must make the book as accessible, as urgent, and as socially relevant as the notification," Prior said. "We shouldn't just use AI to trim costs or speed up workflows. We should use its scale and power as an engine for growth—by identifying what people are already passionate about, we can map a journey toward longer-form reading."

Signs that the industry can compete for attention already exist, Prior noted: the growth of romantasy, graphic novels, multicast audio productions, and books that have broken through to broad audiences all demonstrate what's possible when publishers stop treating the book as a cultural object on a pedestal. She also offered Pan Macmillan's partnership with the charity the Multibank—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.

Prior closed with three calls to action: get publishing staff into communities through volunteer days; treat literacy as a collective mission rather than a competitive advantage; and use technology to lower barriers to reading, whether by building entry points to books from football scores, recipes, or gaming content. The goal, she said, is a sustained, inclusive reading culture by 2035.

"Our advocacy for the next generation must be as relentless as the algorithms we are competing with," she said.