Links of Interest: May 10, 2023

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Traditional Publishing

  • Penguin Random House puts forth “voluntary separation offering.” This comes after similar buyout offers from other Big Five publishers Hachette and HarperCollins. The offer is available to employees who will be 60 or older as of the end of the year and who have 15 years of service or more. Read Michael Cader in Publishers Marketplace (sub required).
  • How to read a royalty statement. Agent Kate McKean and author Laura Portwood-Stacer go over her latest royalty statement from Princeton University Press. Read at the Manuscript Works Newsletter.

Bookselling

WGA strike

  • A clear and helpful look at specific reasons the WGA has decided to strike. Two very practical issues are discussed: Streaming isn’t paying writers the same as other models, and AI could be used in a sneaky way to pay writers less. If AI produces “source” material (no matter how bad), then writers can potentially be paid at lower “adaptation” rates. Read Max Read at Read Max.
  • George RR Martin speaks out on what he considers the most important issue in the strike. The so-called “mini-rooms” make it challenging for new and young writers to start their careers. Read at his site.

Creator Economy

  • Cartoonist creators join forces to avoid burnout. A group of six creators have formed the Cartoonist Cooperative to help each other market and promote, especially in the face of corporate consolidation that threatens their livelihoods. Read Zach Rabiroff at the Comics Journal.

TikTok

  • Popular TikTok poet accused of plagiarism. Nineteen-year-old Aliza Grace has more than 600,000 followers and has published 16 poetry books. The writing community, however, has outed her for plagiarism of other poets and songwriters. Read Darshita Goyal at the Daily Beast.
  • Ann Patchett is now a BookTok influencer. No surprise, Patchett has her bookstore’s marketing manager to help things along. Read Sophia Stewart at Publishers Weekly.

Amazon

  • Amazon debuts Inspire app. It’s like a hybrid of TikTok and Instagram; its primary purpose is to help consumers shop. Read Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.

Legal

  • Attorneys for Simon & Schuster and Bob Woodward respond to Donald Trump’s lawsuit. The case is about whether the publisher infringed on Trump’s copyright by publishing The Trump Tapes: Bob Woodward’s 20 Interviews with President Donald Trump. In their filing, the attorneys defend their clients with established law and precedent on their side. The Copyright Act stipulates that government officials speak for the people and cannot own the words they speak while carrying out official duties—and Trump’s interviews with Woodward were conducted while he was in office. Moreover, Trump never registered copyright in the interviews, giving him no basis for filing a copyright infringement suit in the first place. Even if he had, other factors play into Woodward’s favor because his activities fall under classic news reporting. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.

Culture & Politics

  • New prize for UK debut novelists over 50. It’s been launched by Jenny Brown Associates, a UK-based literary agency. (Anyone in the US want to do this?) Read David Barnett at the Guardian.
  • Annie Ernaux breaks every taboo of what women are allowed to write. The most recent winner of the Nobel Prize writes about only herself; one conservative French critic called her “Madame Ovary.” Read Rachel Cusk in the New York Times Magazine.
  • Notes from Prince Harry’s ghostwriter: He had to spend hours with Prince Harry on Zoom and meet his inner circle. Then the press found out about the book. Read J.R. Moehringer at the New Yorker.

AI

  • An easy-to-understand lecture about the copyright questions raised by generative AI. The talk is by Pamela Samuelson, a preeminent law professor at Berkeley. What particularly stands out about this talk: She tries to remain neutral but frequently refers to those people out there (presumably not at Berkeley) who are quite “mad” about potential copyright infringement. She pointed out that copyright law is the only law currently on the books that could bring generative AI “to its knees.” She also implies the Copyright Office is not well equipped to deal with the complicated questions posed by generative AI, and that it’s setting “industrial policy” without any technological or economics expertise. Watch at YouTube.
  • A long FAQ about generative AI from a legal (copyright) standpoint. This is geared toward helping practicing journalists, but is helpful for anyone looking for a neutral explanation of what the law says so far about generative AI. Keep in mind this could date very quickly. Read João Pedro Quintais and Nick Diakopoulos at Medium.
  • Probably the best thing Jane has read on AI, writing, and creativity so far. This article is by Stephen Marche, author of the AI-generated novel The Death of the Author. He offers a fascinating look at how he used various AI tools to achieve specific effects in his novel, and he comments at length on the implications of the technology for writers. “If you take a hammer and hit yourself over the head with it, the hammer did not give you a headache. If you make bad art with a new tool, you just haven’t figured out how to use the tool yet. Also, tools are just tools: Everyone has access to a thesaurus; some people have richer vocabularies than others nevertheless. Linguistic AI is no messiah, and it is no anti-Christ. It is a fundamentally mysterious tool whose confounding inabilities will be as surprising as its wondrous capabilities.” Whether you agree or not, this is worth your time. Read at the Atlantic (subscription may be required).
  • AI is taking the job of Kenyan college essay writers. Kenya is a major hub for the “contract cheating industry,” and its freelancers are seeing earnings drop dramatically. Read Martin K.N. Siele at Rest of World.
  • Remember the Findaway Voices–Apple brouhaha over machine learning? This is a very long dissection of what might have been done, if anything at all, to train generative AI on audiobooks distributed to Apple via Findaway Voices. Read Monica Leonelle at Author Analyst.
  • Scribd says its content may not be used to train AI tools. In a recent press release, Scribd announced an updated Terms of Service that states no one may use Scribd’s data to train large language models without consent. However, a recent investigation by the Washington Post already turned up Scribd as a major source of data for such tools. So, what gives? Scribd was once a very different site—a repository of free documents and sometimes pirated materials. Likely those early versions of Scribd were scraped and have been used. Read the press release.
  • Researchers are trying to find out what books are known to ChatGPT. The abstract says, “We find that OpenAI models have memorized a wide collection of copyrighted materials, and that the degree of memorization is tied to the frequency with which passages of those books appear on the web.” Learn more.