At Spotify’s investor day presentations, global head of audiobooks Owen Smith said that the company’s program that sells subscribers an additional 15 hours of audiobook listening a month (Audiobooks+) for $11.99 is “on track to reach $100 million in annualized recurring revenue this July.” (Financial translation: The means that by July, they expect monthly sales to reach $8.33 million.) To further that growth, they will be adding a higher tier for “power readers” as well as “Family and Student plans.” Smith underscored that, “Almost half of our audiobook listeners are under 35—meaningfully younger than the broader market—and we’re helping publishing […]
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B&N CEO Responds to Criticism About Selling AI-Generated Books
Responding to online criticism, Barnes & Noble ceo James Daunt tempered remarks he made earlier this week in a Today Show interview, in which he said that the chain would stock AI-created books as long as they were clearly labeled. “I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it,” Daunt told book club host and imprint publisher Jenna Bush Hager. “So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an […]
Pirated, AI-Produced Audiobooks Proliferate on YouTube; AAP Partners With Vermillio to Fight It
Pirated, AI-voiced audiobooks are popping up all over YouTube, creating a copyright infringement problem for publishers. The users posting the videos are able to include ads, and make money off of the books. The New York Times reports that a YouTube version of John Grisham’s latest novel The Widow, featuring an “emotionally flat, robotic” AI-generated voice has over 80,000 views. The images that go along with the book, which is about “small-town lawyer in rural Virginia who finds himself on trial for murder” are nonsensical and include: “a waterfall, a family picnicking on a tropical beach, people snorkeling around a coral […]
Checking Fourteen Years of Commonwealth Prize-Winning Stories, Only Recent Ones Are Flagged By AI Detector
In the continuing conversation about possible AI use in winners of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the Atlantic asked a Pangram research scientist to put all of the past winning stories into the AI detector. (In a separate Atlantic podcast, Pangram co-founder Max Spero claims that the tool has a 1-in-10,000 false-positive rate.) Only four stories in the prize’s 14-year history were flagged as being wholly or partly AI-generated—three stories from this year and one from last year. The magazine states, “100 percent of the text in [Jamir] Nazir’s and [Edward DeMicoli]’s stories was flagged as likely to have been […]
831 Stories Signs First-Look Deal With Hulu
831 Stories, the romance imprint published by Authors Equity, has signed a first look deal with Hulu. The Hollywood Reporter writes that the first project under the deal is “a TV adaptation of Alexandra Romanoff’s Big Fan book series.” The series follows a political consultant who becomes involved with her boyband crush. Disney’s 20th Television will produce the series, with Michelle Nader writing and executive producing, and 831 founders Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo co-executive producing. 831 Stories launched in 2024, with the aim of becoming, according to Mazur, “hip, horny Hallmark.”