The publishing industry has never met a technological advancement it didn’t fear. AI is just the latest panic in a long line of false alarms – Claude
Note: this post went out on LinkedIn about two weeks ago, but halfway through threading the post into TNPS blog an end of monsoon season storm decided it would be fun to take out electricity, internet and other infrastructure that most times allows me to muddle by online. And then Gambian customer-service kicked in – GMT: Gambian Maybe Time – and almost two weeks later I’m still waiting for the full fix, but at least I’m back online and the lights are on.
“Young creatives, full of vim and vigour, unbetrayed by life, endeavouring to create new, optimistic worlds in our midst…well, I find it exhilarating to be around them and their positive energy” – Nadim Sadek
That’s exactly how I feel about the kids at my school here in The Gambia, West Africa. Positive energy exudes from children. Publishing professionals not so much.
Nadim Sadek is the exception that proves the rule. Sadek this week has been talking about AI to creatives at London’s National Film & Television School, which is one of many features that makes Sadek one of the most significant AI commentators out there today.
AI Wasn’t Invented to Destroy Publishing
Sadek understands that AI was never invented to destroy the publishing industry, as the industry’s Luddite Fringe would have us believe. In fact, publishing is a sideshow for AI, a theme I explored back in January 2024 and am revisiting today.
Here’s the thing: As Sadek is showing, AI is key to the future of many parallel industries to publishing, including but not limited to, TV and film.
Publishing’s Luddite Fringe has spent the past decade or so screaming in terror about the threat of Netflix, which transitioned from DVDs to streaming in 2007, the same year the Kindle was launched. Ebooks were going to decimate high street booksellers, self-publishing would result in a “tsunami of crap” that would bring down mainstream publishers. And Netflix was the final element of Armageddon. Publishing folk seriously believed that streaming video instead of watching the same film on DVD would somehow destroy the culture of reading. And let’s just throw social media into the witches’ cauldron to complete the recipe for publishing’s doomsday. “It’s the attention economy, stupid! Publishing is doomed!“
Then tablets came along. 2010 arrived and the Luddite Fringe were ecstatic. Another reason to scream the sky is falling.
TikTok began rolling out in 2016-17 and another death knell of our industry had been sounded. The Luddite Fringe partied like there was no tomorrow, because of course the Luddite Fringe are convinced there is no tomorrow. Every day is doomsday.
The Contradictions of Fear
Which is why when AI came along – or more accurately, when ChatGPT came along (AI has been around a long while now) – the publishing industry was falling over itself to be the first to say how AI could never do even a single thing a human could do.
AI writing is rubbish! AI narration is crap! No one will ever buy something written by AI! Nobody wants AI! Only humans can write/draw/narrate/compose/be creative… Whatever it was, humans could do it best. AI was a joke. And that’s why we were all running about like headless chickens screaming that AI is stealing our jobs, destroying our culture and eating our children for breakfast.
When it comes to juggling contradictory statements, the Luddite Fringe rules supreme. Eternal sons and daughters of Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, the Luddite Fringe can easily believe six impossible things before breakfast, and double that by lunchtime.
And there’s the problem. The Luddite Fringe is so busy looking up, to see if the sky is falling, that it is totally blind to the reality of AI happening at ground level all around them.
AI Is About More Than Publishing
Which brings us back to the quote from Nadim Sadek. Talking to TV and film folk about AI? What have they got to do with AI? Everyone knows AI was invented for the sole purpose of destroying publishing, and thereby destroying civilisation as we know it, because of course there is no civilisation without publishing.
You want proof? Look at stone-age man. They never had celebrity-written novels or royal biographies, and that’s why they lived in caves!
At which point: Full disclosure: I still struggle to find the on-switch on my mobile phone, and I have to ask the kids at nursery school to adjust volume or ringtones. I think Fred Flintstone was its previous owner. I use it occasionally for making and receiving calls, for the very occasional text message, and for the Kindle app, which until this month was the sole reason I needed or wanted a smartphone.
But… When I’m not writing TNPS I run an innovative not-for-profit nursery and primary school intent on reimagining Gambian education for the 21st century. And believe me, the education sector Luddite Fringe here make the publishing industry Luddite Fringe look like amateurs.
Next month I am about to start trialling AI in my school – unheard of in this part of the world – using a smartphone.
Official government policy here is for every school to have one laptop by 2030, for admin purposes. AI for learning is still in the distant future. Except, it’s not. It is going to happen in my school next week, with not a laptop in sight. So a crash course in switching on smartphones is in order this week.
But fortunately for me, my job as a publishing industry observer and analyst doesn’t require hands-on familiarity with every new tech development, any more than being a good driver means knowing the mysteries of the internal combustion engine, or a connoisseur of art needs to be good with a paintbrush and easel.
Nor does it require me to do headless chicken impressions every time the letters AI crop up in a conversation.
The Real Story: AI Barely Knows Publishing Exists
Let me whisper this quietly: AI, generative or otherwise, is not actually about the publishing industry. In fact, AI barely knows we exist, and cares even less.
These past couple of years we’ve seen authors, artists, translators, editors and publishers convinced the AI bullet has “publishing industry” written on it, and we alone, among all the world’s people and all the world’s industries, have been singled out for extinction by this new techno-menace.
We so love to play the victim card!
And this is precisely why everyone in the publishing industry should be reading and listening to Nadim Sadek. Because pretty much everything we do, hear and see is already being heavily influenced by AI, in just about every field imaginable.
It’s October 2025, and we’d have to be a monk living in a cave on a desert island not to have AI working its magic for us each day, often without our even realising it.
And we’re still in the early hours of AI Day One.
For the Luddite Fringe, of course, there is no Day Two.
Not All Fears Are Irrational
That said, not all fears are irrational.
Yes, jobs will go. No question.
So what else is new?
How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? Or even a decade ago?
More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century? And for a certain group within publishing, how many are doing jobs that existed even ten years ago?
And about that audiobook boom… Yes, audiobook narrators, I’m looking at you, among others.
The Audiobook Revolution That No One Predicted
Audiobook narration has been a sideshow for the industry for most of the time audiobooks have existed (1932, since you ask). Audiobooks were not on any publishers’ lists of priorities. Only the blind listened to them, and if you were blind you probably weren’t working so couldn’t afford them anyway.
As BookBeat CEO Niclas Sandin said, “No market survey said anyone wanted audiobooks.”
In fact, checking my list of things market surveys missed realising people wanted is… Well, just about everything. No market survey said we wanted ebooks, or TV, or radio, or x-rays, or sat-nav, or Pringles.
And I’m sure back when Johannes Gutenberg was tinkering with his first printing press, his neighbours were standing at the fence saying, “Johannes, what are you doing with this craziness? No market survey ever said anyone wanted printed books!” And another would pipe up, “Johannes, think about all the quill makers and parchment makers and scribes you will put out of work. Be a good Luddite and smash that machine to pieces right now.”
Back in the 1930s, less than a century ago, audiobooks came on vinyl. And maybe even on shellac 78 RPM disks, as music did way back in pre-history. Then came cassettes in the 1960s and CDs in the 1980s.
Digital audiobooks came along in the 1990s, with Audible among the first-movers, but you downloaded the audiobook to your PC. The iPod, effectively the first mobile digital audio device that freed us from lugging about cumbersome cassettes or CDs, would not exist until this century. It launched in October 2001, shocking consumers with its size and weight and the hitherto unimaginable possibility of storing 1,000 songs!
The first iPod weighed 6 ounces, about the same as the iPhone 13 today, and had a then beyond incredible 5GB storage. Top storage today can exceed 1TB.
The iPod ceased production in 2022. I’m sure we all remember how sad we were that all those iPod factory workers were out of a job, and how we all vowed to protest, demand changes in the law, take Apple to court for crimes against humanity, and generally acted like we cared.
No, hold on, we all collectively shrugged, said “Who gives a f**k so long as it’s not my job“, and got on with our lives. These people only had a job because the iPod was invented, and now it’s time to move on. Find another job. Retrain for another career. Who are these dinosaurs who think jobs are for life?
Oh yeah, that’s us. The publishing industry.
Jobs Created by Technology
But with the arrival of meaningfully-sized mobile devices, digital audio took off. Suddenly we have an audiobook boom and tons of new jobs are being created for narrators, not to mention new income streams for authors and publishers.
This graphic from Statista, showing audiobook production in the US between 2007-2021, gives an idea of the scale of change in the audiobook narration job market.
Put simply, there was almost no work for narrators in 2007, and many people who now call themselves narrators probably had never even considered the idea of making a living from narrating back before 2010.
This Nielsen graphic for the UK, over a shorter period, just 2014-21, tells a similar story. The audiobook market was rapidly expanding and publishers were struggling to meet demand. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
NB The internet today isn’t keen on me finding more recent stats, but safe to say the trend continues upwards.
But here’s the thing: Out of nowhere, new jobs suddenly materialised. And how we rejoiced! More narrators were needed. And more translators. And of course authors and publishers were taking full advantage. New jobs were being created in audio studios, and more jobs in distribution. Entire new platforms were being created around digital audio that simply could never have existed twenty years ago.
But how did all this come about?
Oh yeah, because of technological evolution. And because the industry was willing, reluctantly, sometimes forced at gunpoint, to change, despite the best efforts of the Luddite Fringe to drag the industry back to the stone-age.
Now we’re all screaming foul because technological change is threatening those same jobs that mostly did not exist ten years ago, and certainly did not come with lifetime guarantees.
The Publishing Apocalypse That Isn’t Coming
Not all jobs will go. The publishing apocalypse being touted by the Luddite Fringe is just knee-jerk nonsense. Publishing will change, adapt and grow in new ways. Just as it changed with, adapted to, and delivered the audiobook market that exists today.
In fact, the audio market will just get bigger and better, assisted by the very AI the Luddite Fringe are resisting. And the more adaptable among the narrators, translators, production crews and authors and publishers will move with the times and emerge stronger for the change.
A Typewriter? What’s That?
Not convinced?
Ask yourself, what happened to all those office secretaries that used to bash away at typewriters all day? Has anyone even seen a typewriter this century, except in a museum? They moved with the times. They learned MS Word and Excel and whatever, increased their skill set and their employability, and they moved with the times, or moved to another career.
And how many writing folks would ever have finished their first book bashing away on a typewriter?
Right now, the smart guys and gals in the publishing industry are asking themselves, how can AI benefit my career? They are taking courses, reading everything they can, writing and refining their prompting skills, and having great fun while they do it.
But there are also some very smart people out there who are way ahead of the game. Who realise that what’s happening is not just another digital value-added bolt-on, like AR or VR or NFTs or cryptocurrency, but that AI is truly transformational.
Who to Follow for Rational AI Commentary
Let me single out here the aforementioned Nadim Sadek, and Thad McIlroy, as must-follows if you want to hear reasoned and rational arguments about how AI is affecting our very own publishing industry, and why we need to seize the opportunity, not fight it tooth and nail.
But remember, AI is not about us. It is not about the publishing industry. We are just a sideshow.
And we need to understand, when we make our irrational rants against AI, that we are not just selfishly saying that our jobs are more important than anyone else’s. We are saying that we really don’t have a clue about what AI is, because we are already using it every day, and we are certainly going to be taking full advantage of it in the future, with absolutely no regard for how many jobs it costs anyone not in our own “special” industry.
The Internet of Everything Is Already Here
We are in what, a few years ago, we were going to call the Internet of Things, moving towards the Internet of Everything. Those terms seem to have fallen by the wayside as the media realised the scaremongering potential of just two letters, AI, embodied by HAL 2000, I Robot and M3GAN, among many narratives that have tapped into our primordial fear of change.
No, the coming few years won’t be comfortable for everyone, and yes, jobs will go in the publishing industry, be certain of that. But new jobs and new opportunities will be created, and life will go on, bigger and better than ever, driven by AI.
To those who say they cannot adapt, ask yourself how you are even reading this post, with not a smudge of ink or a sheet of paper in sight. The fact is, you’ve already changed. We all have. We’ve adjusted, adapted and eventually come to love and rely on the very things we not long ago found so scary and for so long resisted.
The sooner we realise that business as usual is not an option, the sooner we can move on, and embrace the opportunities unfolding.
Beware The Future. It’s Already Here.
Okay, essay over, now some chichat about AI and this post.
Did AI write this article for me? Did it, f**k! I’m a professional author and teacher. I’d no more let AI write my posts than I’d let AI take my classes.
But as mentioned above, I’m introducing AI to the classroom, and for a year or three now I’ve been running my posts past an AI to fix typos, add sub-headers, spot grammar misses, give me metadata, and, wait for it, to offer suggestions.
Here’s how it happened for the body of this post, word for word.
MW: Good morning, Claude? How’s life in AI-Land?
Today’s task is to tidy up an essay, adding a heading, subtitles and all the usual spelling and grammar fixes, and to round off with a slug, a key-phrase and a 156 character metadata description.
The pasted text is pretty much as I want it. Feel free to add suggestions, of course.
Claude (Anthropic) replied:
Good morning! Life in AI-Land is interesting as always—constantly evolving, much like the subject of your essay!
I’ve read through your piece and it’s a powerful, engaging argument. The voice is strong, the examples are well-chosen, and the narrative arc works beautifully. Let me offer you a polished version with structure, headlines, and the metadata you need.
Claude added:
A few notes and suggestions:
- Minor corrections made: “Carroll” (not “Carrol”) “booksellers” (one word) “No one” (two words in this context) “thereby” (not “hereby”) “valued-added” → “value-added” “govt.” → “government” (spelled out for better readability)
- Structure: I’ve added subheadings that break up the text and guide readers through your argument. They’re punchy and reflect the conversational tone.
- The meta description hits exactly 156 characters and captures the core argument while being SEO-friendly.
- The slug includes your key themes and is URL-friendly.
- Optional consideration: You might want to add a brief intro paragraph before the Sadek quote—something like “The publishing industry has never met a technological advancement it didn’t fear. AI is just the latest panic in a long line of false alarms.” But your current opening is strong, so this is just a thought!
The piece has real punch and your voice comes through clearly. The audiobook case study is particularly effective. Ready to publish!
So yes, you could argue AI wrote this post: the headline is part Claude’s, and I kinda like the intro, so used that, but gave Claude full credit. And Claude fixed the typos and grammar misses, except in this last bit I’ve added after the fact, so typos may have slipped through here.
But its still my work, in the same way the latest PRH bestseller you read will have been written by the author even though it was painstakingly proofed by a proofreader and edited by an editor, and the cover created by an illustrator, and the book printed and bound by a bookbinder and sold by a bookseller.
AI fixed my typos and added sub-headers in a blink of an eye. But no, no sub-header writer or typo fixers lost their job because of my selfish actions.
On the other had, I saved time, the post reads smoothly (you may not agree with it, but pause to admire Claude’s hard work with the subs and typo-fixing!) and I’ve hopefully convinced a few publishing professionals on the fence to revisit AI’s possibilities.
And best of all, I’ve spoon-fed the Luddite Fringe with their daily dose of Self-Righteous Indignation Juice, with added vitamins and frothing-at-the-mouth powder.
AI is a win-win for me!
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.
