With the avalanche of interest in generative AI and the large language models they are trained on, stories have resurfaced showing the process’s dirty roots. As shown in a 2021 working paper authored by Jack Bandy and Nicholas Vincent, OpenAI, Google’s BERT and variants, and many other foundational LLMs all have “documentation debt” to BookCorpus, “a popular text dataset for training large language models.” Compiled in 2014 by researchers at the University of Toronto and MIT, BookCorpus should have been called Stolen from Smashwords. The researchers apparently scraped posted, self-published ebooks posted by Smashwords that were being offered to read […]
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Amazon’s New Ebook Return Policy to Take Effect Shortly
Amazon’s new restrictions on ebook returns will be rolled out in the US by the end of the month, the Authors Guild reports. The policy, encouraged by the Guild and announced in September, will limit automatic returns on books where more than 10 percent has been read. This change to the policy was supposed to be implemented by the end of 2022, and a press release states that Amazon is “in the final stages of making these technical changes.”
Ingram to Shut Down Aerio
Aerio, the innovative platform that enabled anyone to sell books easily online and brought Ingram Content Group their first direct-to-consumer option when they acquired the company (founded as Aerbook) in 2015, will close as a freestanding service at the end of January 2023. The company told customers in a “service alert” sent by email on Tuesday. Our queries to a company representative were not answered. Aerio provided the technical foundation on which the better-known Bookshop.org was built. And the advisory note sent to Aerio customers suggests, “Another great selling solution is Bookshop.org!” Aerio storefront sites will shut down on January […]
Kobo Plus Subscription Services Add Audiobooks
In Canada, Kobo is expanding their Kobo Plus subscription ereading service to include an option for unlimited use of over 100,000 audiobooks. A single format — reading only, or listening only — costs $9.99 a month, and the combined reading and listening subscription is $12.99 a month. In a separate report on ebook reading and sales in 2022, Kobo says reading time on their platform in Canada declined “a slight seven per cent” compared to last year, “understandable given relative freedom from lockdowns and an easing of pandemic restrictions.”
NFTs in Publishing Face Audience, Contract, and Market Obstacles
On day two of the Penguin Random House antitrust trial that recently captivated all of publishing, agent Ayesha Pande was asked by the government to name some of the rights in publishing contracts that are non-negotiable. “Ebook is one of those rights and audio is one of those rights,” responded Pande. “Now the new territory that seems to be a little bit in contention is NFTs.” Though it was far from the trial’s flashiest moment, this exchange brought to the fore a question that has lingered at the fringes of the business for over a year now: what is the […]
Webtoon and Wattpad Team Launch Yonder
The team behind Webtoon and Wattpad has launched Yonder, a new serialized fiction app. They write in a release that Yonder “elevates serialized fiction, with a focus on curation, stories from influential authors and publishers, and an enhanced experience that rewards readers with more to read.” Publishing partners with content on the app include Blackstone Publishing, Aethon, Sterling and Stone, Portal Books, and Wraithmarked. The app is currently available on Android and the company says it’s coming soon on iOS. Yonder does not have ads, but every story on the platform allows readers several chapters for free before requesting that […]