Against the backdrop of the widespread application of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in large-scale reference books, publishing entities must face up to and embrace the emerging technological ecosystem. By deploying advanced technologies, understanding algorithmic logic, clarifying complex copyright relationships, predefining rights boundaries, and establishing verifiable evidence chains and governable platform collaboration mechanisms, they can rebuild a copyright-centered publishing ecosystem adapted to the AI era. How to fully leverage AI to improve the compilation quality and knowledge service capacity of large-scale reference books while ensuring clear ownership of works, stable rights chains, and explicit division of liabilities and effectively prevent and address new types of algorithm-driven infringement disputes has become an unavoidable key issue in the field of large-scale reference book publishing. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes systematic solutions for the editing and publication of large-scale reference books in the AI era. This paper adopts methods such as literature research, comparative research, historical research, normative research and case studies. Faced with the systematic impacts and multi-dimensional risks brought by AI to the compilation and publication of large-scale reference books, the focus of copyright governance is no longer to conduct patchwork fixes for individual links. Instead, it is imperative to develop a holistic and forward-looking governance system covering ownership confirmation, rights protection and rights utilization to rebuild the publishing order and ensure the sustainability of knowledge production. This path should take "ownership governance – right protection – right utilization" as its core axis and center on a copyright governance system that is consistent with legal logic and adaptable to technological reality. This will enable the compilation and publication of large-scale reference books in the AI era to achieve a dynamic balance among legal rights confirmation, technical support and market transformation, thus laying a robust institutional foundation for the survival and development of publishing entities in the AI era. With the in-depth development and extensive adoption of AI, human–machine collaboration in reference book compilation has evolved from tool utilization to intelligent co-creation. Consequently, traditional reference book publishing must transition from carrier-based publishing to digital-intelligent publishing centered on knowledge services and nurturing. It is necessary to establish a new copyright-centric publishing ecosystem by clarifying complex copyright relationships and reasonably avoiding potential copyright disputes. Reference books will evolve into iterable, callable, and collaborative knowledge systems, while publishing houses will shift their role from content processors to knowledge organizers, data governors, and rights operators. To achieve this transformation, it is essential to develop a full-chain copyright governance framework based on more proactive ownership arrangements, more refined creation traceability, more comprehensive protection mechanisms, and a more open system for rights utilization.