Recent news and lawsuits have discussed the use of artificial intelligence with regard to creative work—whether AI-produced work can be copyrighted (it can’t) and if using books to train machine learning is a copyright violation. Much of the conversation within the industry is focused on contract language, where agents and authors are hoping to limit the use of AI without permission and block any training on their material, while publishers are trying to retain flexibility for the future and not make promises they can’t fulfill. Quieter perhaps is how publishing companies are using the technology in their day-to-day operations, and […]
Still Another Lawsuit: Authors Guild Sues OpenAI In New York
Following three similar suits filed in San Francisco (and thus in California’s sometimes unpredictable Ninth Circuit), on Tuesday the Authors Guild and a roster of well-known authors filed suit in New York’s Southern District against OpenAI for the “flagrant and harmful infringements of plaintiffs’ registered copyrights in written works of fiction” in training their large language models. The Guild and named plaintiffs David Baldacci, Mary Bly, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Maya Shanbhag Lang, Victor Lavalle, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, George Saunders, Scott Turow and Rachel Vail […]
People 9/20
Scribd Will Move eBooks and Audiobooks To New App
Scribd announced that it will now separate its content across three products, with ebooks and audiobooks moving to a new app called Everand. Everand will also host magazines, podcasts, news articles, and sheet music. Meanwhile, Scribd.com and a new Scribd app will continue to host documents and other community-uploaded content, while they continue to operate SlideShare as a separate entity. Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd, said in a release, “Over the last 16 years, we’ve offered a wide variety of content to everyone, but we recognized that readers either gravitated toward ebooks and audiobooks, or documents and research. […]
Oprah’s Book Club
Oprah Winfrey chose Wellness by Nathan Hill as her next book club pick.
Trade Sales Down 6 Percent in July, While eBooks and Digital Audio Grow
The AAP released Statshot data from participating publishers for July, reporting trade sales of $557 million, down 6.4 percent from $595 million last year. Sales for adult books were $399 million, down 4.6 percent from $418 million. Hardcovers sold $96.4 million, down 2.3 percent, while paperbacks fell 10.1 percent to $149.6 million. The biggest gain in the category was in digital audio, which grew 14.6 percent to $61.5 million. Consistent with the year’s trend, children’s and YA sales declined more, at $158 million, a 10.7 percent drop from $177 million in July 2022. Hardcovers were up 3.4 percent to $49.3 […]