Publishers, authors grapple with AI’s arrival

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This article was published 30/11/2024 (306 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A startup that plans on using artifical intelligence (AI) to flood the market with 8,000 books next year is drawing criticism from many in the book industry.

Spines is based in Miami and, according to an article in the Guardian, plan on charging authors between $US1,200 and $5,000 to proofread, edit, design and distribute books with the help of AI. The company recently secured US$16 million in funding, and has pledged authors will retain 100 per cent of their royalties; they’ve estimated the total timeline for a book’s production, from submission to publication, will be two to three weeks. (Going the route of traditional publishers typically takes anywhere from six months to a year or more.)

Social media posts by numerous authors and traditional publishers condemned the plan; in a thread on Bluesky, for example, publisher Canongate wrote “these dingbats… don’t care about writing or books… Most days books aren’t profitable enough to bother with. But then a new way to exploit people appears — and it’s fully automatable! Now money starts circling, like a curious shark.”

HarperCollins, meanwhile, has signed a deal with an as-of-yet unnamed company to provide access to some non-fiction backlist titles to help train AI, according to a report on Quill & Quire. Authors have the option to opt into the program, and it’s not yet known whether Canadian authors are included in the deal.

And on a not-entirely unrelated note, B.C.’s Wendy H. Wong recently won the 2024 Writers’ Trust Balsillie Prize for Public Policy for her book We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age, which looks at the ways data is collected and the legislation needed to protect human rights and autonomy. The award comes with a $60,000 prize.

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A growing number of readers are opting to ditch the popular book reviewing/cataloguing site (and Jeff Bezos-owned) Goodreads in favour of The StoryGraph.

According to HuffPost, a movement among many in TikTok’s book community (called BookTok) have decided to bail on Bezos, particularly after he stopped the Washington Post from endorsing a presidential candidate in the U.S. election and congratulated president-elect Donald Trump for his win.

The StoryGraph is a Black woman-owned company created by Nadia Odunayo in 2019 as a university side project while she learned to code. The site is now up to 3 million users, as compared to the 2 million it had in December 2023. (By comparison, Goodreads boasts some 150 milliion users.)

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A reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has won the National Book Award for fiction.

Percival Everett’s James, which offers the perspective of Jim, the Black slave in Twain’s novel, won the top fiction prize at the awards, which were handed out at a ceremony on Nov. 20.

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The non-fiction prize was awarded to Jason de León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, which saw the author and anthropologist embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border over a seven-year period.

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Other winners of the top prizes were Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for Something About Living in the poetry category, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’s Taiwan Travelogue (translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King) in the translated literature category and Shifa Saltagi Safadi for Kareem Between in the young people’s literature category. Each of the winners receives US$10,000.

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Retail giant Costco plans to drastically scale back book sales in 2025, with only a fraction of their many locations selling books year-round.

Earlier this year it was reported that Costco was considering moving to only selling books at its big-box retail locations from September to December. Sources in a recent Publishers Weekly story, however, now suggest 100 of Costco’s more than 600 locations will continue to sell books year-round, although there was no indication as to which stores would continue to carry books.

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The final Speaking Crow poetry night of 2024 takes place virtually on Tuesday at 7 p.m., and will be hosted by Angeline Schellenberg.

The long-running monthly poetry night won’t have a featured poet this time around; rather, it will be an all open-mic format, so tighten up your best three minutes of verse and visit wfp.to/A8G to register (even if you just want to watch).

books@freepress.mb.ca