Among the audience of around 250 industry professionals at the Customer Experience Centre in Poing, Germany, some were veterans of every event since the first summit was held in 2014.

Opening the event, Alicia Cifré, Canon European vice president, production direct sales, gave special thanks to all who had contributed over the years, and said: “We started the Future Book Forum in 2014 to support the publishing industry, and we have created this community to develop the business and support the book market.

“The main objective for us was to create the connection around the publishers, the book printers and the main stakeholders around the book world. For Canon our main target was to develop and bring to market the best technology to create super high-quality books, which is most important when comparing traditional technology with the digital market.”

“With all of us, we add value to the market.”

This year’s theme is ‘Grow Your Audience with Liquid Design’.

Hosted by futurist and thought leader Peter Fisk, day one of the event included a thought-provoking session on liquid design and how fast-growing businesses are combining physical and digital aspects of technology for seamless transactions and interactions.

Fisk stated: “Liquid is about this connection. It’s not physical, it’s not digital, it’s both – it’s when they truly come together. When you think about the physical book and how that become a digital book at the same time, and how you can use the power of all the data and all the technologies to create the book, to distribute the book, and to help people use and magnify the impact of that book over time as well.

“Liquid is our big idea, and we’re also talking about design, because design is about problem solving. If you can think about the customer experience and how you can flow like liquid through the customer experience, using a mixture of physical and digital touchpoints, we can do much, much more.

“How can you ‘liquify’ your business and your future?”

Jörg Engelstädter, founder and manager of the Future Book Forum, commented: “We have to understand that it’s not putting books on pallets, it’s earning money and making the business different – that’s what we have learned over the years.

“it’s getting ideas about what could be your business in the future, because we have to change.”

Day one also included a look at how AI tools can transform content creation and the repurposing of existing content. The team from Quantic Brains showed how a book could be generated from a handful of prompts within minutes, or an audiobook created using a preferred version of a particular style of voice – or the author’s – again using AI to vastly reduce the amount of time required.

Holly McLoughlin, content creator and community manager at Tandem Creative wowed the audience with her insights into the power of TikTok community BookTok, which can propel a title into the bestseller lists.

Similarly, Eirik Wahlstrøm, co-founder and CEO of Ludenso, gave a live demo of how the firm’s technology can quickly and seamlessly add augmented reality aspects to textbooks to enhance pupil engagement and the learning experience.

Sophie Wybrew-Bond, senior VP of Lifestyle, Knowledge and News at UK-headquartered media group Future explained how the business “reverse engineers” by starting with digital engagement and then ends with physical connections to its customers such as magazine and live events.

“We are interested in high intent audiences, who are asking questions on search engines. We go where the conversation is happening… we go where the audiences are and then pull them towards the physical product,” she explained.

Day two of the forum included an update on the Publishing 2030 Accelerator initiative that was launched at last year’s event.

The independent Accelerator team is looking at three workstreams: the carbon footprint of a book; distributed book printing network; and re-evaluating costs and emissions.

Regarding progress on the carbon footprint workstream, Rachel Martin, global director of sustainability at Elsevier and project lead, said: “There are rabbit holes upon rabbit holes you can go down… what we wanted to do was to figure out where is the carbon impact load, and what has the most impact?”

She said this had resulted in the development of a principled approach that would work across different types and sizes of publishing business, and also internationally.

“We looked at content creation, paper production, printing, transport and retail and end of use.

“What we came up with was a headline figure for CO2 emissions per printed copy sold, and we also had a breakdown on those emission categories. It’s not about greenwashing and it’s not about a label. It’s about a transparent way of accounting for carbon.”

UK printers in attendance included CPI Group, Halstan, Harrier, TJ Books and W&G Baird.

Visual scribing artist David Vignolli captured the topics and ideas being discussed with a dynamic artwork created during the event.