getAbstract Reveals Longlist for 26th International Book Award, With AI and the Future of Work Dominating
The longlist for the 26th getAbstract International Book Award — one of the world's oldest continuously presented non-fiction book prizes — has been revealed, and the books vying for the trophy share a striking preoccupation: what machines can do, and what humans still can.
Laura Lesum, Rights Director at getAbstract, issued the statement announcing the longlist on 31 August 2026. The Switzerland-based company, which produces compressed book summaries in partnership with participating publishers, has run the award since 2001. It honours authors, in the organisation's words, "whose ideas deepen our understanding of society, business, leadership, and the world of work" (Publishing Perspectives).
This year's eligible titles were published between June 2025 and May 2026. The prize is split into two categories — German and International — both carrying the subheading "Business Impact." Ten books made the International longlist. Nine made the German one.
The International category reads like a syllabus for the current decade. Three of the ten titles address artificial intelligence head-on: Creative Machines by Maya Ackerman (John Wiley & Sons), Creativity in the Age of AI by Deborah Yao, Jerry Wind and Mukul Pandya (De Gruyter Brill), and What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y Arcas (MIT Press). The remaining seven range across shorter working weeks, emotional intelligence, sales meetings, innovation history, trend forecasting, team design and personal resilience.
The German longlist tells a similar story. Führung im Zeitalter von KI — "Leadership in the Age of AI" — by Richard Butler, Manfred Becking and Jörg Nitschmann (Carl Hanser Verlag) and KI für kluge Kommunikation — "AI for Smart Communication" — by Anita Hermann-Ruess (GABAL) put artificial intelligence alongside questions of climate policy, female power, workplace connection and accelerating professional experience. Volker Perthes's Die Multipolarisierung der Welt (Suhrkamp), on the multipolar world, and Thieß Petersen's Klimaschutz in der Marktwirtschaft (Verlag Barbara Budrich), on climate protection in a market economy, broaden the lens beyond the digital.
The publishers represented span the trade and academic divide. HarperCollins and its imprint HarperCollins Leadership appear twice on the International side. MIT Press places two titles. John Wiley & Sons also earns two slots. Smaller and independent houses — De Gruyter Brill, Black Inc., Rethink Press — sit alongside them.
The longlist now moves through a standard prize funnel. A shortlist will be announced on 15 September 2026. Winners — one per category — will be named on 8 October at the 2026 Frankfurter Buchmesse, the annual Frankfurt Book Fair and the world's largest trade event for books.
For a prize now in its 26th year, the through-line is clear. When getAbstract first honoured non-fiction in 2001, the pressing questions were globalisation and the internet. A quarter-century later, the longlist is still asking how work changes — only now the machine sits at the desk beside the human, and the books are trying to work out which tasks belong to whom.
