Category: AI
Redundancies in UK Publishing: A Misleading Snapshot of 2024
Why is there so little analysis out there of what the Trump years may bring for our industry? Love him or loathe him, no-one is ever going to accuse Trump of being a booklover and a friend of the publishing industry.
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Pearson credits AI with driving sales
Pearson is at the forefront of a fundamental shift in educational publishing that in time is going to bring into question the very viability of printed books in the education sector.
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Hollywood explores how AI is reshaping the future of entertainment. Trade publishers look the other way
“Much of the 14th China International Digital Publishing Expo – which had huge numbers of publishers and thinkers present – focused on AI. Not because it was an AI-Expo, but because China has simply got on and embraced the technology” – Nadim Sadek, Shimmr.
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While trade publishers are scared to get off the AI fence, Wiley seeks more lucrative deals. Trade CEOs, wake up and smell the coffee!
With more access to trade content for training, LLMs can become more efficient in the trade sectors where it currently lags behind, opening up new revenue streams and potentially new and transformative concepts yet to be explored.
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Macmillan Education launches AI tool for teachers
But unless teachers understand prompting they are likely to not get the best from AI and offer negative feedback, so this could backfire spectacularly. I’d like to know more about how teachers are going to be trained to use AI effectively.
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NaNoWriMo is a procrastinator’s dream. But it’s got AI right. And the new gatekeepers are worried
The new gatekeepers are not the publishers but the established authors looking to protect the status quo and keep the market as non-competitive as possible.
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Wiley to pocket $44 million this year from AI deals but rightly says no to author opt-outs
Just who do authors think is in charge here? Traditionally, publishers do not give authors control over where their books are sold or in what format, or what else the publisher might do to maximise revenues. If we authors don’t like that, we can self-publish.
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UK’s Society of Authors asks AI companies to tell them which books were used to train LLMs because the SoA hasn’t got any evidence
The SoA believes they have such a strong legal case that they have, after several months choosing the right words, written to the tech companies with a seven day ultimatum (one hundred and eleven days to write the letter, seven days to comply – hey, that’s fair!) to acknowledge receipt.
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Audible’s “first AI-powered search for audiobooks” fuel unfounded fears about the future of human narration
AI narration of audiobooks, while understandably initially perceived as a threat, can actually offer several benefits to human narrators, if they are willing to embrace the opportunity unfolding.
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Ghana prepares to embrace AI in publishing while western Luddites fight to hold back the industry
Much of the world has simply skipped the entire landline/PC/dialup era and almost overnight gone straight from never dreaming of owning a phone and never having seen a computer, to having a 5G smartphone in their hands.
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No, the Creatives’ Rights Alliance does not speak for 500,000 people. Nicola Solomon needs to heed her own demands about consultation
And one has to wonder how it is that all these organisations have joined the Creatives’ Rights Alliance at the same time. Should we be reporting that to the competition authorities?
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As more academic publishers embrace AI, trade publishers need to get off the fence
Curiously I’m not seeing many big publishers writing to their authors and asking if they want their publisher to continue to stick its head in the sand so the authors miss out on all these new revenue streams.
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