One of the biggest obstacles to AI in publishing right now is that infernal legal ruling that needs striking out so AI companies can, with due respect for and partnership with human authors, take generative AI to the next level, knowing their creations will enjoy the same legal protection now being demanded by human authors and artists.

PW’s AI panel-debates have been happening this week alongside the headline news about the FTC and Amazon, and both topics are covered in the latest Velocity of Content podcast, which every Friday features PW’s Andrew Albanese offering an industry-focussed View from the Big Apple, a hebdomadal must-listen for everyone in publishing.

Albanese naturally kicked off with the FTC vs Amazon news, very much echoing the TNPS view that publishers created this Frankenstein monster and have only themselves to blame.

Albanese: “Publishers were not innocent bystanders in this. They all cashed the cheques, all signed the deals, all fed this monster that they knew was one day was going to come back and eat them.”

Over at TNPS I had of course taken those sentiments a little further.

“When it comes to playing the victim card and putting on raucous demonstrations of self-righteous indignation, the publishing industry is in a historic glass house and really cannot afford to throw too many stones.

“Playing the victim as this latest case heads to trial reeks of hypocrisy when so many in the industry rely daily on Amazon for a substantial part of their revenue and profits. And all the more so if we take a step back and ask ourselves at what point Jeff Bezos put a gun to our collective heads and forced us into this relationship?

“Oh yeah, that’s right. He didn’t. He just pursued the same unsavoury (and perhaps at times unethical, or even illegal) business tactics big publishers and big book retailers regularly resorted to.”

But the real meat of the Velocity of Content podcast lay in Albanese’s summary of the PW debate sessions about AI, the latest threat to publishing complacency that far too many in the industry are all-too-quick to cast as the enemy.

So much to discuss in this arena, and rest assured I’ll be returning to this fast-evolving topic time and again, but for this essay I’ll limit myself to a couple of contentious points Albanese raises in the short span of the linked podcast. (Just 15 tiny minutes! Christopher Kenneally, this is outrageously too short to cover a full week’s industry developments!)

The PW debates successfully separated the various key AI elements that pertain to the publishing industry: AI as a valuable tool; AI as a threat to authors’, artists’ and translators’ jobs; AI as the Moriarty of copyright abuse and IP theft; and AI as the industry’s elevator to new heights of achievement.

The issues of alleged or actual copyright and IP abuse are well-rehearsed, with strong arguments across the spectrum, that will ultimately be resolved in a court of law, at least in the USA. Fair use or plagiarism are legal definitions and need legal decisions, and in turn we will need law changes to encompass new ways of doing thing not envisaged when the copyright laws were passed.

But the real legal issues yet to be decided are a) whether copyright can exist for something not created by a human, and b) whether the law’s job is to protect jobs.

Thus far, the pendulum swings towards the need of human involvement in order for copyright to be valid. A 2016 law ruling, upheld by appeal in 2018, noted that animals in general, and a snap-happy monkey in particular, could not own copyright. And this case is now being used to argue AI creations cannot be copyrighted. But the reality is, this is a nonsensical argument, and we only need to look at photography law on copyright to see why.

When you take a photograph then, at its simplest, a button is clicked and a photo appears by chemical or digital magic. A baby could do it, and under the law that baby would then own copyright of the image chemically/digitally created. Given a baby’s physical and mental development, it’s safe to say the monkey, in the 2016 case aforementioned, did more work than the baby. So the law is actually nothing to do with meaningful human input based on intelligence, and everything to do with the law being an ass.

Disclaimer here: Babies are not unintelligent. As an advocate of baby-learning and an if-I-ever-get-time-to-finish-it author of a book titled “Childhood: the Highest Stage of Evolution,” I constantly argue the distinction between intelligence and knowledge, and that babies are simply brains on legs, little bundles of super-intelligence (natural intelligence, not artificial!) that they will mostly have knocked out of them by the factory model education system they will inevitably be subjected to.

But to the point: even if we allow that copyright requires a human element, still we have the beyond stupid legal ruling at end August 2023 asserting that a work created by artificial intelligence without any human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law.

“By denying registration, the Register concluded that no valid copyright had ever existed in a work generated absent human involvement, leaving nothing at all to register and thus no question as to whom that registration belonged.”

In this case, a piece of art designed by AI was denied copyright because it was “generated absent human involvement”, which goes to the heart of the generative-AI debate, because no AI has ever created anything “absent human involvement.”

There are currently any number of lawsuits alleging AI is using human-produced content (visual and text) to train on, and totally safe to say the AI in the above case did not suddenly magic itself out of the ether and create a piece of art with no prior training based on the works of human artists that preceded it. In the same manner, no text-based AI creation magics itself out of thin air without first having been trained on human-produced material and without first being instructed, or prompted as we must now say, to create something.

The prompter is no different from the photographer who positions the camera, arranges the lighting, and clicks the button.

The chemical/digital magic the camera then works is no different from the generative-AI magicking a new picture or arrangement of words to create a new content product. In both cases the results are based on the prompts and parameters set by the human prompter/photographer.

What is different is that the actual chemical/digital image produced in the photograph is, entirely, created by machine. The machine itself is not trained on past works of art or past photographs, or even the photographer’s knowledge and experience. The actual act of creation is purely that of the machine.

Yet the photograph is copyrightable and that copyright belongs to the prompter. An AI creation that by definition requires far more human input to exist, is not. The prompter is denied copyright, As above, the law is an ass.

As I explored in a TNPS post back in June, “Learning and training by emulation is as old as the arts themselves.”

None of which should detract from the many other legal cases where actual non-permissioned infringement of copyright is alleged, and the many debates about how creatives might be compensated if and when AI uses their content for training purposes.

We should be clear that these are quite separate issues legally, but that go to the heart of the aforementioned judgement, because the very fact there are so many allegations (as yet unproven in court) of IP theft and such, simply strengthens the case for AI content being copyrightable. Why? Because all these cases are saying, quite clearly, that all the AI content now being created is based on human input. The issues are around permission and compensation are distinct legal issues that need to re dealt with But the fact that humans were involved ought not to be in question, except in the mind of Judge Beryl Howell.

Okay, so let’s return to the Velocity of Content podcast, and pick up where we left off with Andrew Albanese, where on two interconnected points I have to take issue.

Albanese says: “That still does not solve the real problem of AI, which is the spectre of these machines replacing human creators. Even if you could do it, a collective licencing system could not divvy up enough fractions of pennies from whatever use AI would be making to compensate any creator enough to losing their work to a machine.”

A little further on he says: “People will always want human excellence. They don’t want to read books written by machines. Nobody wants books to be divorced from human authors.”

Here’s the thing, Andrew: If that’s the case, where’s the problem? The “spectre of these machines replacing human creators” is just a spooky ghost story if, as you say, “People will always want human excellence. They don’t want to read books written by machines. Nobody wants books to be divorced from human authors.”

All we have to do is ensure AI-created content is labelled as such (Amazon has already made some moves in that direction) and then let the consumer decide. These nasty, second-rate AI-produced books will languish in the nobody-loves-me section of any bookstore that allows them in, and pretty soon the AI-prompters will get the message and find a new hobby. Problem solved!

Clearly Andrew spent too much time with Markus Dohle during the debates, and some of Markus’s affably amusing “we know best” qualities rubbed off.

Markus Dohle back in May: “Readers need guidance and orientation provided by publishers and retailers who help them to find their next best read.”

A warning to others in the vicinity. Gatekeeping is contagious!

Andrew Albanese, of all people, should (and does) know better. He’s witnessed any number of publishing professionals tell us what people don’t want, only to be proven wrong time after time. Nobody wants self-published books. Nobody wants ebooks. Nobody wants subscription. Back before Andrew’s time, nobody wanted paperbacks.

And I’m pretty certain that back in the 1440s, Markus Dohle’s great-great ancestor and neighbour of the illustrious Herr Gutenberg, was peering over the yard fence saying, “Johannes, mate, don’t waste your time with that moveable type printing craziness! Readers need guidance and orientation provided by parchment and vellum scribes and illuminators with only the finest duck quill pens to help them to find their next best read.”

But let’s be fair to Markus. Christopher Kenneally ran with the headline, “Markus Dohle assured the industry that AI will not prove the death of publishing,” and nothing to disagree with there.

Quite apart from the fact that Dohle has already told us – and a judge – that subscription is what will bring the industry to its knees, the threat from AI to publishing is not an existential one. Quite the opposite. AI promises to take our industry to new heights of creativity and revenue potential, if only we will stop hiding behind knee-jerk reactivity, look at what’s on offer, and accept that, with change, comes casualties and adjustment.

Yes, jobs will be lost, and yes, some companies will not survive. That’s life. That’s business. And that’s publishing.

The reality is that publishing jobs do not come with life-time guarantees. Never have, never will. And the sooner we stop treating our own industry as some special case and face the reality of technological progress, the better.

As I said in April, “Consumers buy into what they want and what they are happy with. Booklovers don’t buy audiobooks to keep narrators in a job. They buy audiobooks because they love the product. No-one buys the next JK Rowling book because they think she needs the money.

“In the same way, consumers don’t buy food to keep farmers employed, and they don’t buy cars to keep assembly-line workers employed.

“How many publishers’ offices are today lined with typewriters because publishers were concerned about the people who worked in the typewriter factories? How many publishers insist authors mail in their submissions to keep the postal workers in their jobs?”

The bottom line is, publishers will follow the money. Sentimental twaddle about how much they care for author careers and author compensation is easily dismissed when we look at author royalty rates and author contracts. Any author is only as good as their last book’s sales numbers.

Markus Dohle was telling us in 2021, as the pandemic publishing bonanza arrived, that there was never a better time to be in publishing. Well, which company CEO would not be saying that as profits rose and the bonuses stacked up?

Dohle is still saying it today, Andrew Albanese reminds us. “Dohle loves to say this is the best time for publishing since Gutenberg.” Yet curiously, PRH royalty rates didn’t change to reflect the enormous profits Dohle was then bringing in, and somehow I doubt the new CEO, Nihar Malaviya, will be springing any author-friendly surprises on us at Frankfurt.

The biggest obstacles to AI in publishing right now are a) the Luddites opposing AI because they don’t understand it and want to appear author-friendly, no matter that their royalty rates are identical to every other publisher and their contracts do the author no favours, and b) that infernal legal ruling courtesy of Judge Beryl the Peril that needs striking out so AI companies can, with due respect for and partnership with human authors, take generative AI to the next level, knowing their creations will enjoy the same legal protection now being demanded by human authors and artists.

As summarised by Kenneally, Albanese said: “If there was a single, top-level takeaway from the wide range of speakers, it is that AI can be good for the book business, despite serious questions and potential challenges.”

And that is spot on.

The post The AI revolution will be good for publishing whether we like it or not. Caution, not resistance, is called for appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

Today, there’s very little we outside the country can meaningfully do to alter the course of Afghanistan’s near-future trajectory, but it would be reassuring to see the global publishing industry at least shine a spotlight on what is happening here, and to let the people of Afghanistan, and especially the girls, know they are in our thoughts.

Bookstores and publishing houses have lost 50% of their customers in two years, according to Abdul Wadood Mukhtarzada, the head of the Afghanistan Publishers Union in Kabul.

Zaki Ahmadi, head of an unnamed publishing house, told The Frontier Post: “We have been working in book sales, publishing, and distribution for about 18 years. Business used to be very good, now it is not, now it is very diminished. Our economy is very damaged.”

Per the Afghanistan Publishers Union, there are about 180 publishers, 550 bookstores and 150 printing presses are operating in the country.

From this post, at least, the problems facing the country are broad economic issues, and there is no direct suggestion made that Taliban government’s extremism is a factor, but is that just a necessary caution?

Earlier this month the Index on Censorship, in a post on twiXter, reported that the Taliban had banned books showing human faces.

It’s just the latest in a never-ending torrent of reports from this beleaguered country that show a country willfully misinterpreting a religion for its own patriarchal and misogynist ends, that negatively impacts the economy.

Two years ago, per a report in AP, the Taliban banned girls from high school.

Over one million girls are out of the education system, tens of thousands of teachers lost their jobs and, although the Afghanistan Publishing Union chooses not to say so, its a given that school text book sales have plummeted accordingly.

As the AP report explores, halting education for girls will have a hugely damaging effect on the people and the economy as the consequences feed through.

It’s a depressing report, but one everyone should read.

But we should always keep in mind what an outlier Afghanistan is, no matter how much the Taliban argue their interpretation of Islam is the only true one.

We only have to look at the UAE, and especially Sharjah, where books and publishing are embraced, to realise that books, and the pursuit of knowledge regardless of gender, are revered. And as regular readers of TNPS will know, some of the biggest book fairs in the world are in Muslim countries.

The Algiers International Book Fair pulled in 2.7 million visitors this year. The Sharjah International Book Fair 1.3 million, the Riyadh International Book Fair 1 million.

In fact, of the five largest book fairs in the world this year, four are Muslim countries. Spain is the only non-Muslim country in the top five, while the number one spot, with footfall of six million, went to Muslim Bangladesh.

Further west, in the United Arab Emirates, the Muslim Al Qasimi family in Sharjah, through the Sharjah International Book Fair and through the Sharjah Book Authority | هيئة الشارقة للكتاب, have made the emirate a hub for global publishing like no other.

And of course Bodour Al Qasimi, former President of the International Publishers Association – IPA and now President of the American University of Sharjah, is an inspiration to girls and women everywhere, regardless of race or religion.

Historically, Timbuktu in modern-day Mali, not so very far from where I am writing this post, was for centuries one of the world’s greatest centres of learning, and widely regarded as the world’s first university. although some say that credit should got to Al-Ahzar in Cairo, also in Africa.

With bitter irony, many books in the historic Timbuktu libraries, a global collection beyond anything medieval Europe could come remotely close to matching, curated over centuries by Islamic scholars, were destroyed by Islamic extremists.

Perhaps, then the Afghan bookstore owners and publishers should think themselves lucky to be still in business at all.

Back in 2018 TNPS was reporting on a booming book trade in the country. This of course before the Taliban returned to power.

Today, there’s very little we outside the country can meaningfully do to alter the course of Afghanistan’s near-future trajectory, but it would be reassuring to see the global publishing industry at least shine a spotlight on what is happening here, and to let the people of Afghanistan, and especially the girls, know they are in our thoughts.

#Afghanistanbookmarket #Afghanistanpublishing #SouthAsiapublishing #girlseducation #girlsmatter #girlsshouldbeinschool

The post Since Afghanistan banned girls from school, its book trade has plummeted 50%. Why is the global industry so silent on this outrage? appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

“I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought” – Gordon Gekko, Wall Street.

Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street has a lot to answer for. Most everyday folk had probably never heard of a hedge-fund or private equity before 1987, even with the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan years in full swing.

Thatcher and Reagan had never quite said word for word that “greed is good,” as Gekko did in the film, but in many ways the film Wall Street captured the worst elements of the era of Thatcherism and Reaganomics and defined the me-first, take-take-take era that was the eighties.

Thirty-five years on, private equity still lives in the shadow of that Oliver Stone film, and that shadow was cast long and hard over the prospective sale of a major US publishing house to private equity firm KKR earlier this year.

Over the course of three TNPS reports in July and August, I took a deep dive into what a KKR buy-out of Simon & Schuster might mean for the industry.

The first, in July, ran with the headline “KKR sale of RB Media paves the way for its Simon & Schuster bid. The industry should be concerned.”

That post took the KKR news about RBMedia as a starting point to raise wider concerns about the way the publishing industry was being acquired by private equity firms with no clear interest in publishing, while also acknowledging that Gordon Gekko style worst-case scenarios were so far not materialising.

“Hedge funds have a reputation for buying, dismantling and throwing away the pieces of their acquisitions with callous disregard for the human cost.

“To be fair, we’ve not seen that happening with the recent trend for hedge funds to buy into the publishing industry. In fact Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, RBMedia, OverDrive and countless other examples suggest maybe the reputation is undeserved.

“And yet one cannot help but be nervous about KKR’s interest in buying Simon & Schuster. Not specifically because its KKR, but because of this shift in control of the industry into the hands of a small number of investment firms that, when the going is good, unquestionably bring enormous benefits.”

I singled out Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, OverDrive and RBMedia, the latter two owned at the time by KKR, the first two by Elliott.

RBMedia had just been sold by KKR for a billion bucks, twice what it paid for it. OverDrive is still with KKR, having been acquired from Rakuten. Every sign suggests it is doing immensely well. We should see the new digital library numbers in January, and likely as not it will be more records broken.

Elliott-owned Waterstones and Barnes & Noble continue to go from strength to strength. Just this past week the CEO James Daunt has been talking of a Waterstones IPO. Barnes & Noble has emerged strong again after after decades of decline.

Sure, stores were closed and jobs were cut when private equity firm Elliott took over the two bookstore chains, and yes, of course, there were human costs. But business is business. Stores were closing and jobs were going long before Elliott arrived on the scene, and on numerous occasions both Waterstones and Barnes & Noble were on life-support.

Today, both stores are stronger than ever. Per the FT report, Barnes & Noble has added sixty new stores since Elliott took over the company, and another fifty will be opened in 2024.

If “greed is good,” as Gordon Gekko famously said, then greed has been good for Waterstones and Barnes & Noble.

Or perhaps we need to take step back from the Wall Street rhetoric and remember that the film was entertainment, not a documentary.

Which is not say all hedge fund operators are saints, or that every business acquired by private equity emerges stronger. There are of course predatory hedge funds out there to live by the Gekko principles. “Lunch is for wimps.” “If you need a friend, get a dog.“

I tackled that topic in the next TNPS op-ed a few days later, as KKR became the clear front-runner to acquire Simon & Schuster.

“KKR CEO Pete Stavros has long had a reputation as part of a more-enlightened and pro-employee breed of private equity investors determined to leave behind the Gordon Gekko image.

“But at the end of the day investment firms like these are all about bucks. What we don’t have is any meaningful commitment to the industry beyond how much ROI the industry can deliver. And that should be a concern.

“Because what happens when the going gets tough?“

Talking more broadly than just KKR, I said:

“The bottom line: these are not publishing people, and have no long-term commitment to the industry.

“In the US, 50% of the news publishing industry is now controlled by hedge-funds.

“Per The Guardian, hedge funds ‘are widely feared by the industry for cutting staff and selling off real estate assets to boost profits.’“

I concluded that post saying:

“We can all hope KKR’s bid for S&S, if successful, will see that company expand and thrive, and employees, authors and the industry expand and thrive with it.

“But for every enlightened KKR RBMedia deal there will be an Alden Global Capital deal happening that will remind us the shadow of Gordon Gecko lurk nearby.“

That just to be clear I was not dewy-eyed and overly-trusting about private equity. In my next TNPS op-ed, where I argued that the KKR deal now finally approved, was good for the industry, I first listed a troublesome story of hedge-fund buyouts that had decimated companies and jobs. The ghost of Gordon Gekko is still with us!

But exactly what happened with those decimated companies is up for debate. These were companies already on the brink of bankruptcy before the hedge-funds acquired them. Were they bought with noble intentions, thwarted by economic realties, or was it always the plan to dismember them? An asset-stripping game putting profit before people?

Per Gordon Gekko: “A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.”

These companies, like Waterstones and Barnes & Noble, had already been mismanaged to the point of imminent bankruptcy. Yet in the case of the two bookstore chains, Elliott turned them around, and much credit to their CEO, James Daunt.

Another CEO might have failed to deliver and Elliott might have pulled the plug, cut its losses, and gone the asset-stripping route to recoup some of its investment. That’s just common-sense business practice. Businesses are not charities.

But Elliott bought Waterstones because it saw potential. Otherwise why appoint Daunt? And when it paid off, Elliott moved on Barnes & Noble, and crucially kept the same CEO for both companies.

To be clear, I’m not Daunt’s biggest fan.

But no question that, for all the job cuts and warehouse mess-ups, etc, Daunt has overall done more good than harm.

And safe to say Elliott did not rush in and buy a bookstore chain and then look around for someone to manage it and happen by chance upon James Daunt. They went in with eyes wide open..

As Gordon Gekko explained to Bud Fox, “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun-tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.“

We can be certain that Pete Stavros was not throwing darts at a board when he bought Simon & Schuster.

Gekko again: “The mother of all evil is speculation.”

It’s an important point, and one that the film gets across clearly. Wall Street (the reality, not the film) is about speculation. Speculate to accumulate. Return on investment. Reward to risk. We all know the spiel.

And that’s fine when we’re gambling $50 bucks, $500 bucks or even $5,000 bucks on a stock we hope will make us a profit down the road. We understand it’s a gamble. Better odds than a horse-race or a roulette wheel, perhaps, but still a gamble.

But when we start talking spending $1.62 billion… Pete Stavros did not by chance happen to hear Simon & Schuster was up for grabs and thought it would be fun to add a publishing house to the portfolio. He at that time already owned OverDrive and RBMedia, and had long since brought on board Richard Sarnoff, who joined KKR in 2011 from then Random House (before the merger with Penguin).

Per Variety at the time:

“Longtime Random House exec Richard Sarnoff has been recruited by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as a senior adviser to help pursue, in part, new investments in media.“

The OverDrive and RBMedia acquisitions will have no doubt been a large part part of Sarnoff’s remit, and we can safely say the same about the KKR bid for Simon & Schuster. This was no gamble. This was a sure-fire bet where, per Sun-tzu in The Art of War, this battle “was won before it was ever fought.”

This past week Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp announced the new Board, as the KKR-deal was finalised and ownership officially transferred, and as the publishing house prepares to mark its 100th anniversary..

In Karp’s own words, Simon & Schuster is embarking on “its journey as an independent, standalone publishing company.”

The official press release is the usual predictable waffle about how wonderful the new team is, how experienced and committed they are, and what miracles they will work. “An exciting new chapter, thrilled to have such a dynamic and highly qualified team guiding us forward,” blah, blah, blah. Like Karp is gonna turn around and say, “This new team is crap, but it’s all we could get, and the company is f***d.”

All the trade media is carrying the spiel – it’s what press releases are for – and we’ll all have already read it or skipped it, depending on how just how bored we were that morning, so let’s move on to what actually matters here.

Because hidden away in the insert-names-and-publish template are a few words and names that do carry meaning.

Words first. Karp, referencing the new Board: “Their collective experience in digital innovation, global business strategy, and deep understanding of the publishing ecosystem will be instrumental in our growth and success as an independent publisher.” 

Now juxtapose the words with the names:

Among the Board are Richard Sarnoff and Ted Oberwager, both already at KKR and both covered in the previous TNPS post on the KKR buy-out. Oberwager, the New York Times reminds us, is “on the board of RBMedia, an audiobook company, and Skydance Media, which teamed up with Paramount Pictures on ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ a Tom Cruise action drama that generated more than $1 billion.”

So we have two KKR insiders with deep experience of media and digital prospects, as well as KKR Director Chresten Knaff, all gently nudging Karp in the right direction if needed.

Of most interest to me is the arrival of Madeline McIntosh, one-time head of PRH US, who resigned shorty after Markus Dohle fell on his sword.

Dohle had previously brought the company into disrepute with his disastrous attempt at convincing a judge the PRH CEO knew what he was doing (if he did, he would never have tried to acquire Simon & Shuster in the first place), while blaming anyone under him for any and all problems, and making unsupported-by-facts and sometimes beyond-irrational claims abut the industry. Bricks & mortar stores will disappear in three years if subscription is allowed to prevail… The print-digital publishing divide is forever 80-20… The list is endless.

It’s not clear if McIntosh left because of the aftermath of the court case, or because of the new management replacing Dohle, or because it was the perfect moment to “build something new.”

Being on the board of Simon & Schuster probably doesn’t count for the latter, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else Madeline has lined up.

But four out of seven is a great start for the new Simon & Schuster Board. What about the others?

V Pappas is not a widely-known name on the publishing circuit, but as COO at TikTok, and before that at YouTube, we should be seeing a clear picture emerging of a new direction for Simon & Schuster where digital is a key driver, not an afterthought. In stark contrast to its bigger rival Penguin Random House, for now still largely locked into Markus Dohle’s “bet on print” roadmap.

Vanessa Pappas joins Kareem Daniel, former chairman at Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution.

Overseeing KKR’s involvement will be Peter Stavros himself. Stavros describes himself as an Employee Ownership Advocate, and that alone says a lot about how KKR differs from some other private equity operators.

After KKR sold RBMedia to HIG Capital, RBMedia’s 300 employees, as equity holders since KKR bought RBMedia five years ago, were lined up for pay-outs that would average $50,000 per person when the transfer to HIG Capital was finalised. Employees with ten years standing were expected to pocket $100,000 each.

The seventh member of the Board is of course Jonathan Karp himself. Karp’s position at Simon & Schuster looks good. More control, a committed parent company, and a fellow Board that will embrace digital opportunity.

But let’s not get too carried away with Karp’s performance so far. There’s a lot of work to do.

Over at the New York Times, Elizabeth Harris waxes lyrical about how the Britney Spears memoir is boosting Simon & Schuster’s bottom line, as if Karp personally write the book for the singer and charmed her into into letting Simon & Schuster publish it. The reality is, Simon & Schuster won the bid for this particular big-selling book. Another day, another book, another publisher. It has very little to do with business leadership. Give me a fistful of mega-bucks and I’ll outbid another publisher for the next celebrity twaddle that comes along. It’s not rocket science, and its certainly not business acumen

If only the publishing game were as simple as Harris seems to think. But publishing is not only about milking the public’s obsession with celebrity.

Karp of course got to be where he is by showing meaningful business skills across the trade and demonstrating a genuine understanding of how the industry works.

But the real test is yet to come. Karp heads a new Board with strong digital inclinations and strong multi-media backgrounds, and while he no longer has an open door to a movie studio, it does mean more doors are open to him to exploit Simon & Schuster content. But the market is facing unprecedented challenges, alongside unprecedented opportunities. The ride ahead won’t be smooth.

But, so far, things are looking good for the publisher, and personally I’m excited to see where this goes.

Karp aside, it’s a fresh start for Simon & Schuster. A relaunch and reinvent opportunity that could steal market share from rivals as well as expand the overall market.

Nihar Malaviya may be head of PRH now, but he’s still encumbered by the Dohle baggage. A chance for Simon & Schuster to move up the publishing food chain and even compete on PRH territory.

But let me end this op-ed with a final quote from the man himself, Gordon Gekko: “I look at a hundred deals a day. I pick one.“

Peter Stavros picked one.

And no-one, least of all Stavros, throws about $1.62 billion unless they have a game-plan and a vision.

The new Board shows us what that game-plan and vision might be.

The post No sign of Gordon Gekko as KKR-owned Simon & Schuster announces new Board appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

So exactly how often does the average person read social media texts on paper?

Reading print improves comprehension far more than looking at digital text, say researchers. A study from the University of Valencia found that print reading could boost skills by six to eight times more than digital reading

Here’s the problem: The Guardian‘s headline is somewhat at odds with the detail of the post.

The biggest issue here is that we are not comparing like with like. Give two equally-competent people the same text, one on screen with no other screen distractions, and one on paper, and my guess is there will be no meaningful difference.

But right from the opening paragraphs the report is telling is the real issue:

“This may be because the ‘linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts. Text on social media, for example, may be conversational and lack complex syntax and reasoning.'”

So exactly how often does the average person read social media texts on paper?

The comparison is a complete nonsense.

A meaningful evaluation would be to give to equally-competent people a printed text and the same text on an e-reading device with no online distractions, and then assess them.

The post Does reading print texts really improve comprehension 6-8 times more than reading digital text? That’s a big “no” appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

In 2019 one in four children were leaving primary school unable to read properly. In England, the home of the English-language.

In a recent op-ed looking at publishing in Ghana, I touched on the long-term literacy issue arising from teaching English using phonics. Some readers urged me to elaborate on the phonics issues.

Phonics has become a huge industry, with companies milking the education system for profit while delivering questionable short-term benefits and nothing in the way of long-term benefits.

In 2019 one in four children were leaving primary school unable to read properly. In England, the home of the English-language.

From the Ghana post:

“Children spend so much time “decoding” words, that they lose sight of the meaning of the sentence and the joy of reading. And when they then face “real” reading where most words do not follow the nonsense rules (just try reading this sentence using Jolly Phonics rules) they see reading as just another chore to do at school to keep the teacher happy. Children are, in many cases, simply being taught to pass phonics tests, rather than building up the skills to master (and enjoy) the art of reading as a whole.”

Real reading? That’s reading texts that have not been carefully written with rhyming three-letter words and words that follow artificial phonics rules.

Yes, it’s fun for little children to read “A fat cat and a bat sat in a hat on a flat mat to chat.“

Phonics-friendly sentences can be fun for children, no question. On the first day.

But children will spend much of their most valuable learning years – ages 2-5 -doing chimpanzee impressions as they learn 44 phonemes (sounds of the English language, comprising 20 vowel phonemes and 24 consonant phonemes).

The problem being, we don’t read sounds. We read words. And all a written word is, is a picture of letters arranged in specific order. The word “the” is a picture. It’s in fact three different pictures of three different letters arranged together as one picture.

“A fat cat and a bat sat in a hat on a flat mat to chat” is a series of pictures of words arranged in sequence to make a sentence. Here they happen to have very similar sound, making it easy to teach them phonetically, but English is not a phonetic language. Most of the English language does not follow simple phonics rules, so the phonics gamesters conjure up “tricky words” to explain the fact that phonics does not actually work very well.

The letter ‘a‘ in the sentence “A fat cat and a bat sat in a hat on a flat mat to chat” makes the “a” sound in “cat” or “hat“, and the consonants follow the simple phonics rules children are taught to obey. So what’s the problem?

Well, the word “to“, for starters. Because the children are clearly instructed from day one that the letter ‘o‘ is pronounced like the ‘letter ‘o‘ in “on“.

The word “to“, the children are glibly told, is a “tricky word.” So, of course, is the word “do“. And “go” and “no” and “so“. These words are not “decodable” because they do not follow the phonics rules. Rather than admit the limitations of phonics, we have to call these words “tricky words”.

Tricky words have to be learned by sight. Which is probably how most people reading this were taught to read.

But how does a child know when a word follows the rules or when a word is a tricky word and doesn’t? They cannot know, except by learning to read properly in the first place.

An example: Take the words “one“, “gone“, “done” and “cone“. In each case the final three letters are identical: “o-n-e“. There is no possible way the child can know how to pronounce all these words correctly using nonsensical phonics rules. Only “cone” adheres to the rule.

The rule being the Magic E rule that accompanies a CVC word. CVC? That will be consonant-vowel-consonant followed by the (magic) letter ‘e‘ makes the first vowel “long”, so “hat” becomes “hate” and “fat” becomes “fate“. “Con” becomes “cone“.

And of course the rule works fine – “bone“, “home“, “clone“. Except when it doesn’t. “Done“. “Come“. “Some“… Try reading the following sentence using the magic-e phonics rule: “Where does the dove live? Where has it gone? One dove is here. Watch it move from here to there.”

“Close”? Yep. CVC-e. “Closet“? Not so much. Yet it’s also CVC-e. Or try “plane“. And “planet“.

And where to start with “honey” or “money” or “worry” or “mother” or “brother”?

Or how about “How, now, brown cow“? How does “own” become “town“?

Back to the “fat cat and a bat (that) sat in a hat on a flat mat to chat.”

Because that letter ‘a‘ is not as innocent as it looks. “‘A’ for apple, ‘a’ for ape“, right?

How about “art“, or “ark“, or “car” or “cart“?

So the child learns another rule. The letter ‘a’ followed by the letter ‘r‘ is pronounced like the “a” in “car”. And of course it works. “Bar“. “Far“. “Cart“. “Chart“. “Farm“.

It works, that is, until the child comes across the word “war” or “warthog“. Or “wary“. Or “care“. Or “share“. Or “stare“… Or (sounds like an ‘r‘) “aunt” – not to be confused with “taunt“.

And what is the child to make of the “a” in “ball“, or “balloon“, or “ballot“? Or in “balm”? Or “calm“. Or “palm.” Or “answer“, or “ask“, or “father“, or “water“…

And what about those silent ‘l‘s in “balm” and “calm” and “psalm“? Or how about in “salmon“. Or the silent ‘b‘ in “lamb” or the silent ‘gh‘ in “light” or “taught“?

Speaking of which, how can a child possibly know that “daughter” is not pronounced like “laughter“, but put an ‘s’ on the front of “laughter” and it rhymes with “daughter“?

Even seemingly safe letters like ‘s‘ and ‘t‘ are a matter of guesswork for the poor phonics learner.

The letter ‘s‘, the children are told, makes the soft “s” sound like in “hiss” or “snake“. Yet the very first words phonics-learners are taught are the so-called SATPIN words, which has the word “is” being deliberately mispronounced as “iss” to conform to phonics rules.

The word “is” is one of the keywords that underpins the English language and must be readable on sight.

In any case, the phonics ‘s‘ issue is not just about the “is” versus “this” problem. How can a child pronounce “television” using the phonics rule for the letter ‘s‘? Or “sugar“? Or “sure“? Or “pressure“? Or “treasure“? Or “pension“?

And as the poor child loses the will to live, we then tell them that actually sometimes the letter ‘s’ isn’t pronounced at all. “Island“. “Isle”. “Debris“.

And of course knowing when a letter isn’t pronounced is an artform all of its own, that phonics just pretends doesn’t exist. I mentioned the ‘b‘ in “lamb”, above, but could have added “climb” or “comb” or “bomb” or….

Then there’s the silent letter ‘p‘ in “receipt“. Or “raspberry“. Or “pterodactyl“.

The silent letter ‘t‘ in “castle“. Or “whistle“. Or “listen“. The letter ‘u‘ in “biscuit“. Or “guest“. Or “guide.”

The silent letter ‘w‘ in “wrapper“. Or “wrestle“. Or “wrong.” Or “who“. Or “whole“.

Silent ‘a‘? “Aisle.” Silent ‘c‘? “Muscle“. “Descent“. ‘Silent ‘g‘? “Foreign“. “Reign“. “Sign“. Silent ‘h‘? “When”. “What”. “Why”. “Where.” And on and on.

Then there’s the “double-o” problem. Jolly Phonics produce books where the double-o words are written either as ‘oo‘ or ‘00‘ (zero-zero), to help the child know whether the word is pronounced like “book” or “broom“.

This is complete and utter bullshit, because the only time any reader, let alone a child, will ever see ‘oo‘ written as ‘00‘ is in a James Bond novel. The child learns the ‘00‘ word by sight, but phonics advocates have to pretend sight word reading is a last resort, so they stoop to font subterfuge.

What the child actually does is he or she recognises the words “broom” or “boom” and “book” or “look” or “cook” by sight. And of course the children then have the further problem of double-o words like “floor” and “door” and “poor“, and “flood” and “blood“. And just when they think it can’t get any worse they encounter words like “cooperate“, and “coordinates“.

So, Chris Jolly, how does the child know that the double-o in floor and flood and book and boom and cooperative are all pronounced differently, and how can they possibly know which is which?

Only by learning to read properly.

Child-phonics advocates (i.e. people who make money from this garbage) like to give us ever-more nonsense about digraphs and diphthongs, trigraphs and split digraphs and phoneme awareness and cognitive load, so the teachers have to waste their time learning to teach the children how to waste their time learning to pass phonics tests.

You see, this is all just about tolerable (not efficient, but not as damaging) for adult and secondary school learners of English as a second language, that understand rules of grammar and can get their heads around basic phonics vocabulary. But WTF is the point of telling three and four year old children to follow the CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) rule so they can apply the magic-e rule, or what to do when they see the digraph “ea“, or “ai“, when they cannot read in the first place?

The digraph “ea“?

Jolly Phonics tells children the the digraph “ea” is pronounced like the “ea” in “eat” or “seat” or “meat.” And so it is. “Teacher“. “Bleat“. Wheat“. “Cheat“. “Beak“.

The child then sees the word “break” or “breakfast” or “bear” or “fear” or “earn” or “sweat” or “ocean” or “react” or “area” or “forearm” and carefully “decodes” the word using the nonsense rule they have learned, only to be told no, that’s not right at all.

One more digraph example: The digraph “ai” is pronounced like the “ai” in “paid” or “maid” or “afraid”.

What’s not to like? What could possibly go wrong? Well, apart from “said“. Or “air“, or “hair“, or “chair“, or “stairs“, or “aisle“, or “mountain“, or “fountain“, or “curtain“, or “captain“, or…

Children try their best to meet the nonsense rules teachers throw at them, but they are so busy learning phonics rules they lose sight of the actual reading, and more importantly they lose sight of the joy of reading.

Future readers, authors, publishers, the country and the economy ultimately pay the price.

The post Phonics – A ticking time-bomb for English-language publishers appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

How many of us today are doing our job in the same way it was done late last century? More importantly, how many of us today are doing jobs that even existed last century?

“This Year’s CES Will Totally Be All AI, All the Time.”

That’s according to an opinion piece over at LifeWire, where Charlie Sorrel last week advised, as if we needed telling, that AI might pop up here and there at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, which is live now and runs January 9-12.

It’s the kind of place I would not be seen dead in. I still struggle to find the flashlight 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 for making calls, for the very occasional text message, and for the Kindle app, which is the sole reason I need or want a smartphone.

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.

So I’m glued to the CES reportage this year, when the local internet lets me, for anything that might directly or indirectly impact the publishing industry, because, per Charlie Sorrel’s headline, CES this year is “totally” about AI. But so far (the event finishes Jan 12) you’d be hard-pressed to find much mention of publishing (although kudos to Kaleeg Hainsworth and the Legible team for being there!).

And there’s a reason for that, that many in the publishing industry seem not to grasp.

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.

The bigger picture

I’ll maybe return to the CES event itself once it’s all wrapped up and there’s enough reportage written up to take a deep dive, and later in this post there’s a couple of quickie items. But here to address the bigger picture.

This past fifteen months I’ve seen authors, artists, translators, editors and publishers running about like headless chickens screaming the sky is falling, convinced AI is coming for their jobs, their families and their pet dog. And that it is going to destroy civilisation as we know it (because as we all know, civilisation didn’t exist until publishers came along).

They are convinced the AI bullet has “publishing industry” written on it, and they 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 watching the CES reportage closely. And why they should be looking more closely at all their non-publishing activities and interests. Because pretty much everything we do, hear and see is already being heavily influenced by AI, in just about every field imaginable

It’s the first week of 2024 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, without our even realising it.

And we’re still in the early hours of AI Day One.

From Business Insider: “AI is saving sales professionals more than two hours of work each day.”

No, this wasn’t specifically about publishing sales people. And yes, that will be Business Insider as owned by Axell Springer, which recently signed a deal with OpenAI to lawfully train and use its content.

In my second life as a teacher, I’m constantly having to reassure education sector people that the AI bullet does not have their name on it either.

Articles like this, from a teacher in Ireland help to allay their irrational fears:

“I’m a high school math and science teacher who uses ChatGPT, and it’s made my job much easier.”

There’s an endless list. But 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?

About that audiobook boom…

Yes, audiobook narrators, I’m looking at you, among others.

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 read 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.“

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. The iPhone Max today has a top storage of 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, 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.

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.

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 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!

So 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?

Technological evolution

Because of technological evolution. And because the industry was willing, reluctantly, to change.

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.

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.

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 skills set and their employability, and they moved with the times, or moved to another career.

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 who are way ahead of the game. Who realise that what’s happening is not just another digital valued-added bolt-on, like AR or VR or NFTs or cryptocurrency, but that AI is truly transformational.

Let me single out here Nadim Sadek, who featured in my recent TNPS op-ed, and Thad McIlroy who didn’t (blame The Bookseller!), 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.

We’re just the sideshow

But per the headline for this op-ed, AI is not about us. It is not about the publishing industry. We are just a sideshow.

And we need to understand that, when we make our irrational rants against AI, 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.

At CES already we’ve seen a “Bespoke AI All-In-One Laundry Combo“, a new washer-dryer combo that skips the need to transfer laundry from one drum to the other. Nice, but what’s really special is that, per USA Today, it uses AI to “optimise everything from washing and drying time to detergent amount used, based on your habits and the type of load.”

Or how about the “Bespoke AI Induction Slide-in Range.”

“The oven features an internal camera, which pipes video onto your smartphone via the SmartThings app, so that you can check on your food without opening the door. It can also be used to create time-lapse cooking videos. It also gives you smart notifications on the status of your cooking project and responds to voice commands.”

Smart refrigerators, robot cleaners, smart dog collars… the list is endless. You name it, it’s powered by AI at some level, and this year, 2024, promises to be the year when things get serious.

Well, not for me. Here in The Gambia, the height of my cooking tech is a gas bottle and hob, because I cannot, no matter how I try, get charcoal to burn. My washing machine is a bowl of water and a scrubbing board. Yet my neighbours will be washing their clothes and cooking over a charcoal or wood fire, while bopping away to the latest tunes on their smartphones. AI is everywhere, make no mistake.

But there was one really major news item to emerge from CES that does pertain to our very own publishing industry, which is all we care about. Or are you going to tell me you will never own a smart TV, or a smart cooker or a – oops! – a smartphone?

SAG-AFTRA signs an AI deal

Remember back in the summer, how we in the publishing industry stood in solidarity with out semi-colleagues in the acting industry, united in our complete and utter resistance to all things AI?

The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and AI voice tech company Replica Studios have just struck a deal, announced at CES, whereby Replica will licence digital replicas of actors voices for use in, for example, computer video games.

Another dam broken. Resistance is indeed futile.

What matters now is how the actors and other Hollywood peoples affected, further rise to the opportunity of AI, instead of doing the knee-jerk waltz.

News publishers are of course already on track, with both Associated Press and Axell-Springer having signed deals with OpenAI. Many more will follow, and most likely that will include the New York Times, currently using a law suit to pressure the AI folks into a better deal.

Book publishers, as usual, are behind the curve.

But early days.

The Luddite fringe is determined to muddy the waters by screaming that the sky is falling and that AI is stealing our jobs, while simultaneously saying AI is so dreadfully bad it can never compete with humans. (Being able to juggle contradictory ideas is de rigueur if you want to be a Luddite.)

Sorting the wheat from the chaff

2024 will start to sort the wheat from the chaff.

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.

2024 and 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.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.

The post Everyone in the publishing industry should be watching CES this month. Because AI is not about us. We’re just a sideshow appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

Hyper-realistic AI creations are merely disrupting an overinflated market.

The linked post is a must-read for the publishing industry, whatever side of the AI fence they are on.

“Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21bn content creator economy,” reports Intelligencer.

“Their emergence has led to worry from human influencers their income is being cannibalised and under threat from digital rivals … But those behind the hyper-realistic AI creations argue they are merely disrupting an overinflated market.”

It’s a must-read post, and much to like here, but sadly it seems the AI-created influencers need to wear low cut tops if they want to make an impact.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn news feed.

The post AI Is Coming for the Influencers appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

The blind leading the blind. Or in this case, Atria leading KKR money on a wild goose chase.

Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, recently acquired by private equity firm KKR, has paid for a TikTok influencer’s cruise, reports Kathleen Schmidt in her latest essay over on SubStack.

The TikTok influencer, who has 1.5M followers but will remain nameless here, is being paid by the publisher to go on Royal Caribbean’s “ultimate” 9-month world cruise. The cruise itself “spans 274 nights and visits 60 countries. The cost starts at $53,999 per person and can go up to $117,599, excluding taxes and fees, and passengers can join it for various legs,” explains Kathleen Schmidt, adding that Atria Books is paying for some or all of 18 days worth of cruise time, with the influencer promoting a selection of Atria titles.

It seems this particular influencer (if you can’t sleep at night without a name and face, click through to Schmidt’s post) is one of many on the cruise, which seems to be a popular way for TikTok and other social media influencers to increase their audience share.

But it transpires this particular influencer, so carefully chosen by Atria, isn’t a fan of books and isn’t even on BookTok. So WTF is Simon & Schuster doing, throwing Peter Stavros‘s money about like there’s no tomorrow?

When I called the KKR acquisition of Simon & Schuster “a digital beacon of hope,” this was not the kind of digital beacon I had in mind.

Richard Sarnoff, Ted Oberwager, Chresten Knaff, Madeline McIntosh, are you even aware of this?

Schmidt is unimpressed by the influencer’s “ability to promote a book in a way that creates demand for it,” adding, “his videos about the book had significantly fewer views than the ones where he showed viewers different aspects of the cruise and what was happening on board the ship.“

According to Schmidt, the influencer openly admits to not being a reader, and of the eight titles Atria has handed him for the cruise, he will read just one, and that will be picked by his followers, who presumably will not have read these particular books either, and likely as not will not be readers themselves.

The blind leading the blind. Or in this case, Atria leading KKR money on a wild goose chase.

“When beauty and fashion influencers promote products on social media,” writes Schmidt, “the brand they align with makes sense for their profile. On BookTok, there are influencers whose enthusiasm for books oozes from every video.“

So why would any book publisher choose a non-reader, with no BookTok following, to go on a cruise to promote a handful of books that the influencer has never read?

As Gordon Gekko famously said, “A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.“

It seems Atria has been very lucky to get together with KKR’s money, but now seems determined to prove the original proverb correct.

Read Kathleen Schmidt’s full SubStack post here.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.

The post KKR’s Simon & Schuster pays a non-reader to go on a cruise to promote a book. Gordon Gekko would be appalled appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

The fact that it is part AI-written raises questions about this book being translated and published in other countries where copyright law may not offer full protection.

Music to my ears. A book part-written by AI has won a prestigious literary award. A fatal blow to the AI Resistance, but also a whole load of trouble for lawmakers and AI regulators who thought they had the topic nailed.

Since long before ChatGPT made AI a public amenity back in November 2022, authors, publishers and other creatives have been saying, with all the certainty that comes with not having a clue what they are talking about, that AI will never be able to replicate human creativity and quality.

Those of us who witnessed and understood the significance of the Kasparov vs Deep Blue chess tournament in the mid-1990s, have just been counting the days for them to be proven wrong. That day has come. But first some background.

When first Gary Kasparov beat IBM’s Deep Blue in 1996 in Philadelphia, mankind breathed a collective sigh of relief. With five years still to go until 2001, the spectre of HAL2000 had been relegated to the movie reel of history.

That is, until the following year in New York, when the notion that a machine could never beat a human was blown out of the water in the 1997 New York City rematch when, in possibly the most exciting spectacle of human achievement since man landed on the Moon, Deep Blue trounced Kasparov. The greatest chess player the world had ever seen had been defeated by a machine.

A machine, of course, created by humans, just as the modern-day chatbots have been created by humans.

Those who misunderstand chess will say it was a calculations game and Kasparov was simply outnumbered, but a good chess game is an art, a thing of infinite beauty.

And the day Kasparov symbolically knocked over his king after just nineteen moves (Nineteen! This was a massacre!) was the day AI came of age. Everything since then has just been a prelude to ChatGPT and its many successors.

And in our hearts we all knew that, whether we understood chess or not. Which is why, when the Luddite Camp blandly asserts AI can never equal human creative quality, they in the same breath can be guaranteed to rant about how AI will take our creatives’ jobs.

This week, news came from Japan that dismantled the two competing Luddite arguments simultaneously.

Rie Kudan, winner of the biannual Akutagawa Prize, said to be Japan’s most prestigious literary award, was about ten when Gary Kasparov let mankind down, so may or may not have known about Deep Blue. but she certainly knew about modern AI.

Earlier this week, Kudan collected the Akutagawa Prize for her novel, “Tokyo-to Dojo-to”, a novel with AI themes, that was lauded by a judge for being “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable.“

Savour those words. A judge for the most prestigious literary prize in Japan, a country that has produced three Nobel laureates, a Booker prize winner and a Man Booker International Prize winner, said Kudan’s work was “almost flawless” and “universally enjoyable.”

Let’s hope the judge was not one of those Luddites that had been asserting AI could never match human creativity, because Kudan has now revealed she used ChatGPT to develop the book.

“I made active use of generative AI like ChatGPT in writing this book,” Kudan said, adding, “I would say about five percent of the book quoted verbatim the sentences generated by AI.“

Music to my ears. Egg on the faces of everyone who has blandly said AI can not match human quality.

At the time of this post going live, there is no word about how this revelation will affect the copyright of the book in Japan, but the fact that it is part AI-written raises questions about this book being translated and published in other countries where copyright law may not offer full protection.

The timing could not be better (or worse, depending on which side of the AI fence you are on).

Because just as IP laws are being reconsidered and reworked, and nonsensical legal decrees are being made about how AI-created works cannot possibly be allowed copyright protection because it is against the natural order of things, some inconsiderate judges in Japan have lauded a work part-created by AI as “almost flawless.”

As we all know, winning any major international literary prize means rights deals and translations galore, and for Kudan the bonanza of additional publicity her AI admission has created means this book will be an even hotter property.

But hold on. If AI works are not protected by copyright in some (most) countries, which agents and publishers will be brave enough, or foolish enough, to bid for these rights?

A whole new can of AI worms has just been opened.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.

The post Japanese laureate deals fatal blow to notion that AI will never write as well as a human appeared first on The New Publishing Standard.

How many Audible subscribers, handing over a fixed sum each month for one single audiobook, also subscribe to Spotify for their music fix?

It was way back in the summer of 2020 that Spotify first announced it was making a move on the audiobook market.

How the industry laughed.

Spotify was more than welcome to juggle podcasting and audiobooks in the insignificant overseas markets Amazon barely knew existed and cared even less about. Go ahead and sign up some two-bit audiobook publishers in Narnia, or the Nordics, or whatever the Scandiwegians call their back yard nowadays.

Go give StoryBeat and Nextel a run for their money, fighting over countries the size of small villages. But don’t for one second think you’re welcome in the “proper” markets where the Big Boys play.

We US and UK publishers have a cozy deal with Audible, which we all pretend is not owned by our nemesis Amazon, and we will do everything in our power to keep foreign influences out of AmerInglish publishing, even if it means selling Simon & Schuster to the Germans!

Turning ideas on their heads

Back in Publishing 2020, Markus Dohle was still the Emperor, subscription was a very, very dirty word, Daniel Ek’s name was unspoken, in the same way as Voldemort’s, and everyone in publishing sincerely believed, and ritually repeated three times before breakfast, that Spotify had single-handedly destroyed the music industry with its streaming nonsense nobody wanted.

Here’s the proof!

Yeah, well, first you have to hold that chart upside down, of course. But that’s what publishing is all about. Turning ideas on their head to maintain the status quo at whatever cost.

No wonder then that, back in August 2020, TNPS was a lone voice saying Spotify’s audiobook ambition was a seismic shift in the publishing landscape.

Markus Dohle, to his possible credit, saw this coming and was worried by it – or maybe he just has a problem with the Swedes! Who could forget Dohle in November 2021, complaining bitterly to The Bookseller’s Philip Jones about Spotify and Storytel buying into the US book market.

Whined Dohle, in the full knowledge PRH, a German company, was attempting to acquire America’s last major domestic publisher: “Look at these investments this week: big bucks flowing into the United States publishing industry, Storytel and Spotify entering the scene.”

The reference of course being to Spotify buying Findaway, and Storytel buying Audiobooks.com. In fact, Storytel has just this week taken a big write-down on the Audiobooks.com purchase, as it attempts to balance its books. Keep that in mind as we proceed.

Leveraging dark secrets about former rivals

Markus Dohle of course fell on his sword after the Bertelsmann-PRH conquest of America failed, and hasn’t been heard from since.

No, hold on, he’s still out there wreaking havoc, leveraging legacy goodwill (and maybe dark secrets about former rivals) to promote his 8020 Overture. That will be the 80:20 print-digital books ratio fantasy (among many) explored here.

The relevance of Markus Dohle in 2024 being that he is no longer head of PRH, and while his successor, Nihar Malaviya, has not completely crept out from under Dohle’s dark shadow, the deal that PRH signed with Spotify late last year was almost inconceivable back in May when the above TNPS polemic on Dohle went live.

Which brings us neatly to January 2024, where Audible’s 5% cut in staffing has been widely reported, including over at TNPS as part of a wider staff-dumping exercise by the Everything Store.

And of course these cuts came after Audible UK last summer reported record sales (up 6%) amid falling profits (down 30%).

We only know about that because of reporting regulations in the UK. In the US, Amazon as usual keeps its numbers to itself, but there’s every reason to suppose a similar story has been unfolding, culminating in the 5% staff cuts. But as we’ll see below, there may be another factor at play.

Rumours confirmed

Back in the summer of ’23, of course, Spotify was still a sideshow in the UK and US audiobook sector, having dipped its toes in the water, but with nothing of substance to offer.

But behind the scenes, Daniel Ek had been busy, and in October industry rumours were confirmed when Spotify launched its Premium option in the UK and Australia with access to 15 hours of audiobooks that included titles from all the major publishers. Including, that is, titles from Penguin Random House. And then it did the same a month later in the US market.

If Markus Dohle had been dead and buried by then, he would have been revolving at a fair rate of knots in his grave. As it was, he just geared up the rocking chair on his Sharjah veranda on the Arabian Gulf , closed his eyes and repeated 80:20, 80:20, 80:20 through gritted teeth. Dohle is a firm believer that if you repeat something often enough it automatically becomes true.

Rapprochement

By any measure this Spotify-PRH rapprochement was groundbreaking. True, the new deal was for a fixed consumption period, not unlimited, and obviously the publishers got a very nice wad of filthy Spotify cash in the pocket to tempt them to deal with the devil, some of which might even eventually find its way to the authors and narrators.

But the important thing was, Spotify and the Big 5 Anglo-American trade publishers were not just talking, but dealing, and that included the mighty PRH.

Clearly Dohle’s successor, Nihar Malaviya, read the TNPS memo on the importance of putting clear blue water between himself and the PRH Dinosaur Squad.

As said in that post, “There’s ten years of anti-subscription misinformation to roll back.” But Malaviya has at least made a start.

Three months is a very short time in publishing, an industry where everything happens in slow motion and even coffee breaks are timed with a calendar, and industry statistics for any previous three months of history are going to be wanting in detail.

Which makes any judgement on the impact of the Spotify deal so far hard to meaningfully assess.

A pun-free headline

But that didn’t stop The Bookseller‘s Heloise Wood framing the latest Audible cuts in terms of Spotify’s Premium deals with UK publishers.

“Audible confirms 5% jobs cut amid discussion of Spotify’s impact,” ran an unusually (for The Bookseller) pun-free headline.

Wood quotes an Audible memo from CEO Bob Carrigan explaining that 2023 had been a “strong year” and that the “business is in good shape.”

Obviously. Why else would a company sack 5% of its workforce?

Carrigan went on: “To position us for continued success in the coming year and into the future, given the increasingly challenging landscape we face, we have to take this difficult decision now.”

Might that “challenging landscape” ahead include Spotify, and the fact that the US and UK publishers, for so long Audible’s poodles, had finally grown a hint of backbone and doubled their common-sense reserves to a whole two iotas?

A clear land-grab by Spotify

Wood turned to a senior media analyst at London-based Enders Analysis, Abi Watson, who confirmed what we are all seeing – that the global audiobook market continues to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But what was especially significant in Watson’s take was this on Audible’s staff shafting: Watson proffered “one possible answer” as being that Spotify’s new Premium deal “has taken a substantial bite out of Audible’s market share.”

Watson said, “The launch was a clear land grab by Spotify. From our perspective Spotify is the most credible competitor.”

The terms of the Big 5 deals with Spotify have not been widely announced, but the consensus is that each big publisher came to terms with Spotify separately. What we do know is that for the big publishers they are being paid as if à la carte downloads, subject to a percentage being read. For smaller publishers the traditional shared pot is still the only option available.

The Authors Guild, on behalf of US authors, said as much in its commendable December report, which looked carefully at what was known about the deals.

The sky is falling! Again!

The Authors Guild’s UK counterpart, the Society of Authors, did no such thing. True to form, the SoA flew the Luddite banner high, ranting that the sky was falling. The Spotify deal would have a “devastating effect” on authors, outgoing CEO Nicola Solomon said, explaining that – shock! horror! – authors had not been consulted about the deal between publishers and Spotify.

As we all know, Audible would never dream of signing a deal with any publisher without consulting the author first. Isn’t that right, Nicola?

Let no-one ever accuse the Society of Authors of thinking something through before reacting.

So are authors being ripped off as the Spotify opponents insist? This was Markus Dohle in 2021: “When it comes to subscription, I am convinced that in the long run it is not good for author income, it is not good for retail.”

Jane Friedman kicked off the New Year’s edition of The Hot Sheet with some blunt talking that was certainly music (no pun intended, The Bookseller!) to my ears.

“My annoyance is hard to hide”

Referring to the incessant industry harping on about how evil Daniel Ek is, and how Spotify is destroying the publishing industry and is responsible for world famine and global warming, Friedman (no big fan of Spotify Premium, as we shall see below) said: “I’m afraid my annoyance at all this is hard to hide. It’s not that I believe Spotify prioritizes doing right by authors or the publishing industry—I’m sure it’s as self-interested as any company and must look for ways to make its subscription service profitable. But as someone who has been following the digital subscription space for nearly 10 years now, it’s clear to me that authors aren’t getting a bad deal with Spotify.”

To which I’d only add the caveat that most authors will be in Spotify via their publisher, and the author’s share of the Spotify payout will depend on the contract they chose to sign with the publisher.

Not something the “Coalition of Concerned Creators” appears to understand.

But all this is a side issue compared to what really matters here: Is Spotify gaining any traction in the Anglo-American audiobook markets?

On that point we need to wait until early February for the Spotify results for Q4, which will include part of the period of the Premium audiobook experiment.

Audible profits were in freefall

I’m not au fait with Spotify’s data delivery for big publishers, but I’m guessing they already have a very good idea of what results Spotify Premium is bringing to the table, and may too have some inkling as to how Spotify Premium US and UK is cannibalising or adding to revenues from Audible and Audiobooks.com and other longer-established audiobook platforms.

Again, keep in mind the Storytel write-down on the Audiobooks.com deal. Keep in mind the Audible staff purge despite everything being just hunky dory.

But also keep in mind the Audible profits were in freefall before the Spotify deal, and the Audiobooks.com write-down may be more to do with creative accounting than any real sign the US operation is facing unexpected headwinds from Spotify.

A nothingburger

Personally I’m on the side of the subscription angels. I believe Spotify offers a better deal than Audible right now. But Jane Friedman sees things differently (The Hot Sheet again) and thinks Spotify’s new take on its audiobook service will be a “nothingburger.”

I think Jane is totally wrong, but here’s the two main points from her “working theory“:

1. Existing Spotify premium subscribers might take advantage of the free 15 hours each month but never purchase additional hours via Spotify.
2. The Spotify deal is a bad one for readers and no-one with a credit subscription with another service is going to jump ship, because the Spotify deal does not confer ownership of the audiobook.

Not that ownership issues have deterred ebook readers or digital library users, of course, so I’m happy to set that one aside as a minority concern. And yes, a point well made about existing premium users, who signed up for premium music advantages and will just take what’s on offer.

It only takes…

But let’s keep in mind that Spotify had some 45 million paying subscribers in the US this time last year (out of a global 220+ million).

It only takes a tiny fraction of those to take advantage of the free audiobook option (and who wouldn’t!) and get the audiobook bug and start buying à la carte or paying for additional download time, and the whole thing becomes very worthwhile.

But here’s where Jane Friedman really misses out on the possibilities: How many Audible subscribers, handing over a fixed sum each month for one single audiobook, also subscribe to Spotify for their music fix?

Consider: Audible charges $14.95 per month, and Spotify Premium $10.99.

Imagine you are a subscriber to both. Suddenly you can get 15 hours of audiobooks for free with Spotify. How many of the monthly Audible credits go on books longer than 15 hours? I just ran a check on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series, a perennial bestseller, and very, very few are longer than 15 hours. Meaning I could pay Audible $14.95 or pay Spotify $10.99 to listen to many of the same books. Over twelve months, and listening to twelve sub-15 hour books, I’d make a saving of $47.52 on the Spotify deal, plus music!

Even if you are just an Audible subscriber, the maths is pretty straight-forward. If you mostly opt for sub-15 hour audiobooks, Spotify is better value for money.

Audible remains the better option for longer books, obviously, and you have the advantage of “owning” the audiobook for re-listening at a later date, but hey, with a saving of almost fifty bucks on the table I could live with that.

Almost three for the price of two

Mileage will vary by genre, and here’s where it gets really interesting. Romance books tend to be shorter than thrillers, and a look at Colleen Hoover’s Audible titles makes the point for me. Almost all her books are 10 hours or fewer. Each one will cost you a $14.95 credit on Audible. Over at Spotify the deal is very favourable. Almost three for the price of two.

Memo to Jane Friedman: Double fries and ketchup with my nothingburger, please!

So Abi Watson over at Enders Analysis could well be on to something with the suggestion Spotify is already, minutes into the long game, making Audible sweat.

But there is a caveat, and again I’ll defer to Abi Watson, via The Bookseller: “Publishers seem to have been quite strategic about which titles are included in the free 15 hours – the first book in a series is often free, with later titles paywalled, and requiring a separate (paid) download.”

Publishers deliberately putting the brake on Spotify’s potential

I don’t have access to Spotify US or UK from here, so have no idea how many Lee Child or Colleen Hoover titles are on both platforms.

But if Spotify is indeed paying the big publishers full whack, and publishers are holding back content, then that sounds like it might be a case of publishers deliberately putting the brake on Spotify’s potential, for whatever sound business, utterly mindless or simply nefarious reason.

But for those titles that are available in both services, Spotify would appear to have the better deal.

For now.

Which brings us back to that 5% staff cut at Audible. If Audible is going to have to lower its monthly charge to compete with Spotify, this might be one way of financing it.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn Pulse newsletter.

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