AINEWS
Beijing's biggest book fair turns 40 and reorganises around short-video sales and AI tools
The Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) opens its 40th edition this week, spanning 1,700 exhibitors from 82 countries.
The Beijing International Book Fair (BIBF) opens its 40th edition this week, spanning 1,700 exhibitors from 82 countries.
The Beijing International Book Fair opens its 40th edition this week in Beijing, a five-day run from 17 to 21 June that puts 1,700 exhibitors from 82 countries and regions across 60,000 square metres of floor space. The anniversary is the easy story. The harder one is what the fair is quietly becoming: a 40-year-old, state-anchored trade show reorganising around short-video commerce, AI-generated content tooling, and cross-media intellectual property licensing, the three forces reshaping how Chinese publishers reach readers and convert content into revenue.
The pivot shows up most concretely in the data the organiser chose to lead with. According to the 2026 Douyin E-commerce Reading Trends Report, a Douyin-published study cited in the BIBF anniversary release, book-related uploads on Douyin, ByteDance's Chinese short-video platform and the domestic counterpart to TikTok, roughly doubled year over year, while book orders on Douyin's e-commerce channel climbed 99% over the same period. Those are self-reported platform figures rather than independently audited industry data, worth holding onto as the fair pitches them as evidence of a market-wide shift.
The technology showcase has a name list attached, which is what separates a real industry signal from a press-release abstraction. The AIGC (AI-generated content) pavilion brings together NetEase, Tencent, Fanqie Novel under ByteDance, Yuewen, and 37 Interactive Entertainment, per the same organiser announcement, a lineup that covers most major Chinese content and gaming platforms under one roof. A debut IP Licensing Zone, run with the China Toy & Juvenile Products Association and featuring more than 20 participating companies, points to the same logic: the unit of trade is no longer the book but the story that can travel across novels, games, merchandise, and short-form video.
The country-of-honour choice adds a geopolitical layer. The United Arab Emirates takes the slot for 2026, the first Gulf state to hold the role at BIBF, a positioning move that aligns the fair with China's broader push to expand publishing and translation ties into the Gulf and the wider Global South. The UAE pavilion sits alongside the long-standing presence of major Western and Asian houses, and the organiser framed the choice as a step toward making BIBF, in the words of CNPIEC vice president Lei Jianhua, a "global creative assets hub." That phrase is Lei's framing rather than an independent industry verdict, and the fair's claim to that role will depend on whether the Douyin commerce numbers and the AIGC deals translate into rights sales and recurring revenue beyond the show floor.
The BIBF ComicHub expansion, with international animation, comics, and games (ACG) voices including Insight Editions from the United States and Comic Republic from Nigeria, fits the same template: treat the anniversary as a chance to widen the tent of who shows up and what counts as a publishable asset. BIBF 2026 is, in other words, less a celebration of 40 years of book fair than a live demonstration of what Chinese publishing thinks book fairs are for now.