At the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet, and Telecom Conference yesterday, News Corp CFO Susan Panuccio addressed Harper Collins’ disappointing results last year, partnering with Spotify, and the use of AI technology. Panuccio attributed Harper’s 2023 sales, which fell 10 percent, to “the Amazon reset with their logistics” and inflationary pressures on manufacturing. Additionally, she said, “quite frankly, we didn’t have as good of frontlist as what we have had in other years.” Still, Harper has succeeded in cutting costs and is in good shape for the rest of the year, she said, with the 5 percent reduction in headcount, as […]
AI
Dutch Publisher Develops AI Books
Dutch nonfiction publisher Maven has developed AI books, allowing readers to engage with a title by messaging with it. Built on the full text of a book—but without the ability to read straight through—the AI book is embedded as a WhatsApp contact and works by messaging in the app. The company markets the AI book as its own separate format, to sit alongside a regular full-text edition. “Although this is not a linear one,” Maven publisher Sanders Ruys said. “You don’t consume it from start to finish.” The AI book is built to be conversational, and users can ask it […]
Inkitt Raises $37 Million In Series C
Self-publishing website Inkitt raised another $37 million in Series C financing, led by Khosla Ventures, valuing the company at about $400 million post-money. (That’s only slightly above where they stood after raising $57 million in 2021.) Unfortunately, the capital will help fund “AI to write stories based on your original ideas, and to produce versions of its fiction personalized for specific readers” among other purposes. The facile tech media repeats CEO and founder Ali Albazaz’s claim that “Inkitt, in aggregate, ranks as the number 11 best-selling publisher globally” — to which TechCrunch amusingly adds “above household names like Penguin Random […]
Judge Dismisses Parts of Author Suits Against OpenAI
Ninth Circuit District Court Judge Aracelli Martinez-Olguin in California dismissed four of the more technical counts brought by authors against OpenAI in multiple lawsuits. The decision follows other rulings in being skeptical that the output of generative AI—even if it is significantly similar to an original work—is a violation of the creator’s copyright. Notably, however, the foundational claim—that training OpenAI on a massive corpus of copyrighted works without permission violates copyright—was not challenged at this stage, and will proceed. Also notable is that Judge Martinez-Olguin did allow another important claim of the plaintiffs to go forward, which is the allegation […]
Using AI to Search Deals and Dealmakers
We have launched an experimental use of an AI-powered search approach at PublishersMarketplace, called Matcher. Up until now, our corpus of over 200,000 deal reports has only been searchable through basic word matching and Boolean search strings—and our Dealmakers lists, while quite extensive, only cover the 100 or so sub-categories that we tag and track. Matcher is designed to help you find agents and editors that “match” your manuscript, using natural language descriptions of your work. In this initial phase, it comes in two versions: Deal Matcher lets you search through the deals database, and highlights the editors and agents involved […]
AAP Joins In New “Fairly Trained” Nonprofit
Fairly Trained is a newly-launched nonprofit that “certifies generative AI companies for training data practices that respect creators’ rights.” Their first certification — denoting licensed models — is awarded to “any generative AI model that doesn’t use any copyrighted work without a license.” to begin with, they have certified nine companies, most of which involve generative AI music. The venture is supported by a number of music industry groups — Universal Music Group, the Association of Independent Music Publishers, Concord, and Pro Sound Effects — but also the Association of American Publishers. And AAP ceo Maria Pallante is among the advisers […]