On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on the “Don’t Steal This Book” campaign launched at London Book Fair, where thousands of authors call on governments to protect copyright in the age of AI. He also covers the backlash against Grammarly’s “Expert Review” feature, which prompted a lawsuit and its withdrawal, and looks at new BookTok charts and Audible’s expansion into eleven international markets.
Listen to the Podcast: ‘Don’t Steal This Book' Campaign Targets AI Policy
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
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Read the Transcripts
Dan Holloway: Welcome to another Self-Publishing News, and this is the week after London Book Fair. I had imagined that most of this would be about London Book Fair. It turns out there's lots of other news going on.
I will start with the one really big thing that you will, I'm sure, have seen everywhere — not just in places where you see things about London Book Fair and book news in general, but pretty much all over your social media feeds as well.
And that is Don't Steal This Book. Don't Steal This Book was an initiative launched at London Book Fair. It is a book — a book with around 10,000 authors — and it is an empty book except for the names of those 10,000 authors. And it was distributed at London Book Fair.
It is a plea to tech firms — obviously, directly, ‘don't steal this book' — but also to the UK government and other governments, coming on the eve of the publication of the assessment of the UK government's proposed legislation on copyright and AI. The basic plea is on the back cover, which says: the UK government must not legalize book theft to benefit AI companies. So that is very clear messaging.
If you remember, there are various options currently being considered for legislation here in the UK. Of those, there is one definite preferred option that the government has, which is a data mining exception to allow rights holders to reserve their rights, underpinned by supporting measures on transparency. That's the quote from the consultation document.
What that would mean is that basically you would have to opt out if you didn't want the books that you hold rights to to be used for AI training. There are various other options being considered: an even broader data mining exception, which is basically one where you couldn't even opt out; strengthening copyright law as it stands so that any use of copyright material for training AI would require licensing; and doing nothing, leaving things as they stand.
The government has made clear they prefer the data mining exception with an opt-out. And this is not something that the publishing industry and the literary industry in general is taking very kindly to. The general direction of travel seems to be that where companies are going to be able to use work to train AI, there should be licensing arrangements in place — and that probably the future is for there to be many licensing arrangements that authors can opt into, and if they don't, their work can't be used.
So AI very much is at the forefront of the news at London Book Fair, and that really is the big story coming out of the fair.
Grammarly and the Expert Review Backlash
And that brings us to the other big AI story of the week, which is another one that has been absolutely everywhere, and that is around Grammarly. Grammarly, obviously, is the tool that helps people with their grammar. It's been a feature of many writers' and many people's day-to-day lives for many years now. It is moving into the AI space, as it inevitably would.
You'll remember a while ago I reported that it has been taken over by a firm called Superhuman. And that ‘super-humanness' includes various AI features. The AI feature that has been causing particular controversy is something called Expert Review. Expert Review is a feature that allows premium Grammarly subscribers to have the platform give them a critique of their work in the style of an editor or writer of their choice.
So for example, if you wanted to know what Stephen King says about your latest horror novel, you can ask Grammarly to edit it in the style of Stephen King, and it will allegedly tell you exactly what Stephen King would have made of your novel.
And this has, needless to say, not gone down very well with many of the authors who are being used in this way. It's very analogous, if you think about it, to those image generators that people were asking to do things in the style of, and likewise text generators that you could use to write something in the style of an author of your choice — only now it's being used for editing.
Needless to say, many of the people whose names are being used here have not been giving permission to have their thoughts and styles and opinions used to train the AI that is supposedly able to give advice in their style. And this has led to a very big backlash and a legal suit.
There is a class action which has been filed by Julia Angwin, who is one of the authors who has been affected by this. In response to this and other backlashes, Grammarly has withdrawn the function. But the lawsuit remains in place, and we will see what comes of that.
It may be possible, if you find out that Expert Review has been doing things in your name, that you might be eligible to join that class action. Do keep an eye out if you think you have been affected.
BookTok Charts
The other thing that is in the news is BookTok charts. This is the expansion of something that was trialed in Germany — charts of the books that are trending on BookTok. This is going to be run by Nielsen BookScan with input by Media Control, who are the team who ran it in Germany.
Basically it's going to be a monthly chart which tells you which books are selling most based on being promoted through the BookTok community. The idea is that it will enable influencers on BookTok to have something tangible to show the level of their impact. It will give information to the industry as a whole and to us as writers about just how influential BookTok actually is.
We know that we are constantly told it's very influential — it's responsible for getting people back into bookshops, for resurrecting reading, for saving the print book, and all kinds of other things. This should, we hope, give us some actual data. That would be very interesting, and may even lead on to enhanced effects such as BookTok influencers wanting to champion the books and films and tunes that the charts ignore. So it might actually drive activity around the charts as well as reflecting activity that is already there.
It will certainly be very interesting. I very much look forward to reporting on the first data that we get from it when it comes out.
Audible Expands into 11 New Markets
And one more story, talking of expansions, and that is the expansion of Audible. Audible has announced that it is moving into eleven new markets. Those markets are Belgium, Egypt, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates — and saving the most interesting to last — Sweden.
Sweden, of course, is the home to many very famous audiobook companies: Storytel, BookBeat, and of course most famously of all, Spotify. So Audible is taking up the gauntlet that Spotify has thrown down and running with it, expanding into these markets. Obviously more opportunities for us as authors to sell into more markets.
All of which feels like a positive note on which to end the week, and I very much look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week. Have a good week.
