Links of Interest: April 10, 2024

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Traditional Publishing

  • Low sales for Biden books. Simon & Schuster has withdrawn its contract with an Axios national political correspondent for a book about the Biden administration. Biden books have not sold well, and last month we reported on the lack of political deals for this season. Read Garrett Ross at Politico (scroll down to find the discussion).
  • Read rejection letters penned by Toni Morrison. The main takeaway: some things about the industry never change. Read Melina Moe at the LA Review of Books.
  • Workers at Oxford University Press threaten to strike. The strike involves about 150 workers in the New York City area. Read Ed Nawotka at Publishers Weekly.

Trends

Bookselling

  • Barnes & Noble workers attempt to unionize nationally. Six stores have already unionized in the past year. CEO James Daunt has asked others not to because it would make things very hard for him. Read Michael Sainato at The Guardian.
  • Indigo agrees to buyout offer. The company will become private again if the deal is approved. The buyout comes from a firm owned by the husband of Indigo’s founder and CEO. Read Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly.

Audio

  • Spotify is raising prices. Sometime this year, Spotify premium plans in the US will increase by $1 per month for individuals and $2 for family or multi-user plans. (Five other markets will see the price jump in April.) However, Spotify will add a new basic tier with no audiobook hours for $10.99/month. In other words: Premium users will be charged $1 per month to keep their audiobook access. Read Chris Welch at The Verge.

AI

  • Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster. Why? To obtain access to longform works for AI training, which presumably would rely on author-publisher contracts to grant them such rights as written today, which is certainly contested. Meta also debated paying $10 a book for licensing rights to new titles. Read the New York Times (gift link).
  • A small publisher considered using AI to evaluate submissions for a brief second. Angry Robot Books announced that it would use StoryWise software to help evaluate submissions until immediate community outcry led them to reconsider. Submissions will now be evaluated only by humans. Read the original statement.
  • OpenAI’s GPT store is spurring copyright complaints. Some of the premium chatbots for purchase are powered by textbooks. Read Kate Knibbs at Wired.
  • Google Books is indexing AI-generated books. Unsurprisingly, the AI-generated books now flooding retailers are also making their way into Google Books search. Read Emanuel Maiberg at 404 Media.
  • Authors: Consider AI transparency statements in your books. The goal: to maintain trust in your work by revealing how AI was used, if at all, to generate, improve, or correct your work. Read Kester Brewin at The Guardian.
  • Amazon Kindle lock screens show ads for AI-generated books. Some people are thinking about paying $20 to Amazon to have the ads turned off. Read Frank Landymore at Futurism.
  • OpenAI launches synthetic voices. The tool generates natural-sounding speech that resembles the original speaker. It only needs a 15-second sample to work and can do translations. Learn more at OpenAI.
  • AI poses more of a threat to publishers than authors. Publishing industry vet Thad McIlroy speaks with Ken Whyte about the future of AI, book publishing, and authorship. Despite his confidence that authors will and can thrive, McIlroy sees threats ahead specifically for run-of-the-mill nonfiction authors—especially in the area of how-to—and children’s authors. Read at SHuSH.

Culture & Politics

  • PEN America in damage-control mode. Some point out differences in how PEN America responded to the Ukrainian-Russia war versus the Hamas-Israel war. Read Prem Thakker, Ryan Grim at The Intercept.
  • Writers end boycott against the Poetry Foundation. Activists wanted the nonprofit organization to make a statement about the Hamas-Israel war. Instead, it made a “commitment to clarity.” Read at the Poetry Foundation website.