Beyond the noise

The fourth edition of the Media Transformation Summit took place online on Tuesday, September 29, bringing together publishing professionals from Canada, Brazil, South Africa, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and other markets. The free event is organized by Publishing Signal and powered by knk, with sessions spanning AI, readers, discovery, accessibility, audio and publishing technology.

Opening the Summit, knk CEO Sebastian Mayeres returned to one of the event’s guiding ideas: “better signal, less noise.” A live poll asking participants what was consuming most of their management attention offered an early clue: while AI and discovery remain prominent concerns, revenue and growth and workflow and operations drew the strongest responses.

That broader question — what really deserves publishers’ attention — carried into the opening conversation with Ed Nawotka, Senior News and International Editor at Publishers Weekly and co-founder of Publishers Weekly en Español. In The Bigger Picture: What Publishers Are Watching and What They May Be Missing, Nawotka and Mayeres moved from AI and discoverability to long-form reading, technology, authority and the changing value of the book itself.

“The crisis in long-form reading” requires more creative solutions, he argued. “What’s the point of creating all of this? What’s the point of being able to surface all these texts? What’s the point of putting all this work in if it simply just goes unused?”

The decline of reading, however, does not necessarily mean a decline in the value of stories. Nawotka distinguished between the act of reading and the broader role narrative plays across culture, pointing to growing opportunities for publishers to develop intellectual property across formats.

Publishers, he argued, will increasingly have to question “why a particular story deserves to be in a particular form.” Some novels, he noted, simply work better as novels than they ever would as television or film. At the same time, “the opportunity for publishers to monetize that IP is growing and growing and growing.”

But the conversation repeatedly returned to something larger than format. “If we look at big picture questions, we’re in a very important business,” Nawotka reflected.

AI inevitably entered the discussion, but less through the familiar question of whether machines should create books and more through their growing role in discovery.

As recommendation engines and AI assistants increasingly sit between publishers and readers, Nawotka questioned whether they will broaden the range of books and ideas people encounter — or simply reinforce what is already dominant.

“AI is an ouroboros. It tends to feed itself on the information that’s most dominant,” he observed, noting that it will increasingly draw on AI-produced content as well. “The question is: are those recommendations going to be narrower, or are those recommendations going to be broader?”

The risk is a feedback loop in which recommendations become narrower rather than more nuanced. “How do we make AI into a much more refined and intelligent, nuanced tool, not a blunt instrument?” he asked. “Can AI go beyond the obvious?”

For Nawotka, the deeper concern is the intellectual environment AI helps create. “My fear is about a narrowing of thought,” he acknowledged, while also leaving open the possibility that AI could broaden access to knowledge if the industry learns to use it differently.

Another unresolved tension, Nawotka suggested, is the distance between people who understand books and those who understand technology.

He described a long-standing divide inside publishing between “people who love technology but don’t love books” and people who love books but remain uncomfortable with technology. What the industry needs, he argued, is more cross-pollination between those two worlds.

That also requires a change in language. Technology companies have often arrived promising to “fix,” “disrupt” or “disintermediate” publishing — terms Nawotka characterized as destructive rather than constructive. He sees signs that this language is beginning to shift.

At the same time, publishers cannot simply reject new tools. Nawotka pointed to research suggesting that larger companies are adopting AI faster than smaller ones, even as resistance grows alongside adoption.

The challenge is adapting without losing sight of publishing’s core value. “You don’t want to destroy the core values of what you do,” he stressed.

That idea became especially concrete toward the end of the conversation, when the discussion turned to Lonely Planet’s renewed investment in printed travel guides.

At a moment when travellers increasingly rely on influencers, social media and an endless flow of online recommendations, putting more effort into print might seem counterintuitive. But the logic, as Nawotka described it, is precisely about what those channels often lack: authority, curation and trust.

The distinction is not simply between print and digital. It is between information that is abundant and information that has been selected, checked and organized by a source with a reputation to protect. In that sense, a travel guide offers something different from an influencer’s individual experience: a finite, structured overview that readers can return to, compare and use as a reference.

Nawotka also linked that appeal to a broader “back to analog” movement. Physical books, like vinyl records or other tangible formats, can carry value beyond utility: they can become objects of imagination, memory and nostalgia.

For publishers, the larger implication is clear. As the volume of information grows — and as its origins become harder to assess — trust and authority may become an even more important part of the publisher’s value proposition.

“You’re paying for the trust,” Nawotka concluded. “And you’re paying for the authority.”

In a Summit designed to separate signal from noise, that may have been one of the clearest signals of the opening session: publishing’s future will depend on technology, but its value may increasingly lie in what technology cannot automatically guarantee — judgment, context and trust.