Regarding the reporting a week ago that Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster to strip mine the catalog for LLM training, the publisher’s ceo Jonathan Karp told a NYT podcast he was just as surprised by the news as you were: “It was really quite an experience for me. So Saturday morning I was eating my breakfast and reading the New York Times…eating my Grape-Nuts… And this was total news to me! I had no idea that this conversation was going on. The story was quoting private conversations that nobody knew about. This really was news to everybody. I’ve checked. […]
BISG Eyes A Bigger Agenda, Looks to Grow Membership
On Friday the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) convened their annual meeting, highlighted by a presentation of their updated strategic plan. Broadly, the board “has been rethinking BISG’s strategy with an eye toward inclusion, research, standards, and education.” Standards — from the BISAC codes that categorize published works to ONIX and other key elements of supply chain communication — have traditionally been the core focus of the organization. But vice chair James Miller, who is senior director, merchandise systems at Barnes & Noble, said the organization aspires to “provide anyone in book publishing with a forum to identify, discuss and […]
Simon & Schuster Celebrates Their Past and Present
Simon & Schuster opened their 100th anniversary season with a blockbuster double-header. On Monday night, they featured over 30 prominent S&S authors on stage at The Town Hall (expertly curated by Cary Goldstein) in a surprisingly entertaining evening, and on Tuesday night they gathered well over 1,000 people in a party at Chelsea Piers. Monday’s event highlighted authors from across the company’s divisions, including many who have substantial history of their own with the house — starting with Doris Kearns Goodwin, who has published with S&S for almost half of those 100 years, beginning in 1977, and finishing with Bob […]
Open Submissions, Closed to AI
On Monday, Angry Robot Books announced an open submissions period for late April, but with a twist: “We will be doing things very different this year. We will be using something called Storywise, which is a non generative AI system that will help us sort submissions. This means that it does not learn from author’s works to inform an AI model, and therefore the AI model is not trained by your work.” But the community objected strongly to any use of AI in evaluating authors’ material. The publisher quickly dropped the idea, posting: “We have been watching & listening to […]
Meta Stole Everyone’s Books Because It Was Cheap and Convenient; Considered Buying S&S, But That Was Unnecessary
Big tech has had a voracious appetite for content to train their AI systems and these cash rich nation states all rationalized their way to theft at scale because it was faster and more convenient than legal solutions — and the legal and legislative system is incapable of holding them accountable in any reasonable timeframe. Thanks to its own lawsuit along with its reporting, the NYT documented the scale of illegal hubris: “At Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, managers, lawyers and engineers last year discussed buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to procure long works, according to recordings […]
New York Lawsuits Against OpenAI Will Proceed
US District Judge Sidney Stein, in New York’s Southern District ruled that a host of New York-based copyright infringement lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft and others can proceed. Judge Stein rejected efforts by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, which represents multiple creator groups in California-based lawsuits, to block or consolidate the New York suits. Those suits include author actions led by the Authors Guild, and followed by other groups of authors, as well as the suit filed by the New York Times. The newspaper’s suit was initially thought to be one of the stronger sets of allegations. As Judge Stein noted, […]