On December 5, 2025, the British book industry found itself at the crossroads of tradition and technological disruption, as James Daunt, the long-serving CEO of Waterstones, publicly weighed in on one of the most hotly debated topics in publishing today: the place of artificial intelligence in literature. Speaking on BBC’s Big Boss podcast, Daunt addressed a question that has been echoing through author circles, publishing houses, and bookshops across the UK—would Waterstones, the country’s largest high-street bookseller, ever sell books written by AI?
Daunt’s answer was as pragmatic as it was revealing. “If it was clear what it was, then I think it’s up to the reader,” he said, according to BBC. He emphasized that Waterstones would be open to stocking AI-generated books, but only if they were transparently labelled as such. “We would never intentionally sell an AI-generated book that was disguising itself as being other than that,” Daunt stated. The decision, he explained, would always rest with the customer: “Do I think that our booksellers are likely to put those kinds of books front and centre? I would be surprised.”
This stance comes at a time when the publishing world is grappling with what some see as an existential threat. A University of Cambridge study published in November 2025 found that more than half of UK published novelists feared being replaced by AI, with two-thirds reporting that their work had been used without permission or payment to train the very language models now capable of generating prose. The anxiety is palpable. According to The Bookseller, 51% of published novelists believe AI is likely to end up entirely replacing their work—raising questions about the future of creativity, authorship, and the value of human storytelling.
Daunt, who has led Waterstones since 2011 and has steered the company through turbulent times, was quick to recognize these concerns. “At the more literary end I don’t see that being the case. There is a clear identification of readers with authors, and booksellers play an important role in joining authors and readers. That does require a real person,” he told the BBC. For Daunt, the bond between a reader and a living, breathing author is something that cannot easily be replicated by algorithms or neural networks.
Yet, Daunt’s position is not one of outright rejection. He acknowledged the enormous sums—"trillions and trillions," as he put it—being poured into AI research by technology companies. “Who’s to know? They are spending trillions and trillions on AI and maybe it’s going to produce the next War and Peace. If people want to read that book—AI-generated or not—we will be selling it. As long as it doesn’t pretend to be something that it isn’t.”
Waterstones’ approach to AI is nuanced. While the company uses artificial intelligence behind the scenes—to streamline logistics, improve customer service, and make operations more efficient—it draws a sharp line when it comes to content. “We use it in a limited way. It helps our customer service operation become more efficient. It helps us in logistics and how you deploy your equipment,” Daunt explained to The Bookseller. “But we don’t use it in the shops at all. And we spend quite a lot of time trying to keep AI-generated content out of our shops, but also out of our online operation as well.”
That effort is no small feat. The proliferation of AI-generated books, sometimes referred to as “AI slop,” has become a growing problem on platforms like Amazon, where poorly labelled or misleading content can slip through the cracks. Waterstones, according to Daunt, is actively using AI tools to help identify and weed out such content. “You can use AI to identify AI, and that’s helpful. But yes, there is a huge proliferation of content, AI-generated content, and most of it is not books that we should be selling.”
Daunt’s comments have resonated with authors’ advocates. Anna Ganley, CEO of the Society of Authors, told The Bookseller, “There’s no doubt that works written by humans need to be distinguished from AI-generated content if these reach booksellers’ shelves, and we’re glad to hear that Waterstones would want them to be clearly labelled as such. Readers will want to know if what they start to read is AI-generated.” In response to the growing concerns, the Society of Authors plans to launch a “Human Authored” mark in 2026, part of an international initiative with the US Authors Guild, to help readers and retailers make informed choices.
Still, the conversation is not limited to the literary elite. Daunt acknowledged that in some corners of publishing—particularly in mass-market children’s series—teams of writers already “churn out” books at a rapid pace. “Some of those publishers might think, well, AI could be cheaper and churn that out even faster,” he said. But for Waterstones, which has built its reputation on championing literary quality and fostering a personal connection between author and reader, the instinct is to “recoil” from such content.
Waterstones’ business model, which empowers individual store managers to select books tailored to their communities, has helped the company buck the broader decline of the British high street. In 2024, Waterstones reported profits of £33 million on sales of £528 million, and continues to open new stores each year. The company is part of a larger group that includes Foyles and Blackwell’s, all owned by Elliott Advisers, and Daunt himself also serves as CEO of Barnes and Noble in the US. With speculation mounting about a possible stock market flotation of the two chains, Daunt has said, “It feels like an inevitability and probably better than being flipped to the next private equity person.”
Daunt’s pragmatic embrace of AI—tempered by a clear commitment to transparency and literary integrity—reflects the broader challenges facing the book trade. The industry is caught between the promise of new technology and the preservation of what makes reading special. As Daunt put it, “We as booksellers would certainly, naturally and instinctively, disdain it.” But in the end, he insists, it’s the reader who will decide. “We try and cover everything and leave it up to the reader to decide.”
As the debate over AI-generated literature rages on, Waterstones’ careful balancing act may well set the tone for booksellers everywhere, ensuring that the future of reading remains, above all, a matter of choice.
