China News Service, Beijing, October 18 (Reporter Ying Ni) The "Regulations on the Promotion of National Reading" will be officially implemented in China in early 2026, marking that the construction of a scholarly society has entered a legal and systematic stage, and also charted a clear direction for the integration of AI and reading - encouraging the development and application of new technologies, but always putting people's right to in-depth reading first.
In the past year, digital intelligence librarians, large models of ancient books, and reading companion terminals have been intensively implemented, and "AI + book fragrance" is moving from concept demonstrations to public cultural infrastructure.
The transformation of the public library frontline is quite intuitive. After being connected to the large model, Beijing City Library's AI digital intelligence librarian "Tu Yueyue" can complete inquiries, navigation, book recommendations and reading guidance across online and offline lines; its 7.15 million-volume three-dimensional book library cooperates with stackers and AGV robots to turn "people looking for books" into "books looking for people."
Xie Peng, deputy director of the Capital Library, summarized the transformation direction as "embodiment", and the library has thus achieved an overall transition from "document retrieval to knowledge push, from open-shelf reading to AR reading".
In the field of revitalizing ancient books, AI is bringing “unpopular secrets” into the public eye. The "Chinese Ancient Books Intelligent Service Platform", led by the National Library of China and jointly built with more than 180 collection units, has gathered more than 13,000 kinds of ancient books and more than 140,000 volumes of ancient books, and has embedded capabilities such as automatic sentence reading, text and text comparison, chronological conversion, and version comparison.
There are also highlights in the practice of local libraries. For example, the Fujian Provincial Library uses a large model of Maritime Silk Road documents overlay to launch the AI librarian "Eight Fujian Scholars" to achieve a closed loop of "knowledge retrieval-document positioning-multiple rounds of questions and answers-knowledge tracing"; the ancient book restoration knowledge base launched by the Hunan Library can generate a "restoration prescription" for each ancient book based on the damage status, including paper use, paste ratio, and process cycle.
Algorithms also help bridge the gap between urban and rural areas. The Guizhou Provincial Library's "Gui Tu on the Cloud·Scholarly Plateau" platform has expanded distribution sites to counties. Shanxi fruit farmers can receive accurate notifications on fruit tree cultivation and pest control during their working breaks.
According to statistics, in 2025, the exposure rate of Chinese adults to digital reading will be 80.8%, and the exposure rate of minors will also reach 75.9%. When "reading as soon as you swipe" and "AI summaries replacing original works" become high-frequency phenomena, and when parents are worried about the weakening of independent thinking and the screen hurting their eyes, Cao Wenxuan, a professor at Peking University, said that there is no need to exaggerate the threat of AI itself. What we really need to guard against is that teenagers will slip from "text reading" to "image obsession" and lose their imagination and thinking ability.
Wu Shulin, chairman of the China Publishing Association, pointed out that artificial intelligence is reshaping children's nervous system, and parents and teachers must know "when to open the cage and when to close it" so that humans always dominate the sovereignty of thinking. In his view, the core foundation of national reading is still graded guidance, paper-based foundation and home-school cooperation.
The "AI + Book Scent" in 2026 has moved from concept demonstration to facility implementation, but practice has been calibrating the boundaries - technology should send people back to the book, rather than finish reading the book for them. As Xie Peng emphasized, personalized knowledge navigation based on experience, insight and care can never be replaced by algorithms.
