Jill Lepore tells Frankfurt Book Fair that machines have swallowed books
American historian Jill Lepore opened the 78th Frankfurter Buchmesse with a warning that the world's books have been swallowed by corporate machines and the future must not be left to tech moguls. She delivered the keynote address at the fair's opening press conference on Tuesday, 6 October 2026. Publishing Perspectives reported her remarks.
Lepore is an American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her book We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution won the Pulitzer Prize for History, a leading US award for books on American history. Her latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. She also writes for The New Yorker.
The warning was blunt, and Lepore tied it directly to reading and writing. She said the sum of human knowledge contained in the world's books has been swallowed whole by machines owned by corporations. She said those corporations now propose that intelligent machines do the work of reading, writing and thinking for people.
That shift, she said, threatens arts and letters. It also threatens freedom of thought and democratic societies. She cautioned against handing the future to a cadre of tech moguls.
Lepore placed the argument in a long history of books and markets. She told the press the fair rests on a tradition more than 500 years old, older than the printing trade itself. Those gathered in the room, she said, meet on the knife-edge of history.
The opening press conference ran from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. on 6 October, with a live YouTube stream listed in German and English. Sebastian Guggolz, Chairman of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, spoke at the session. Juergen Boos is Director of Frankfurter Buchmesse. Frankfurter Buchmesse
The main fair is scheduled for 7 to 11 October 2026. The fair had announced Lepore as its opening press conference speaker in March. Frankfurter Buchmesse
What makes this stand out is the choice of stage. Frankfurt is where publishers trade rights, meaning permission to publish books in other languages and territories. Lepore used that trade gathering to ask who controls knowledge once books become training material for machines.
