On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway brings two pieces of good news for indie authors: the launch of the Indie Manga Alliance, a new US-based group representing manga creators and publishers outside the mainstream, and Libro.fm's expansion into e-books, giving readers another way to support indie authors and bookstores at the same time. Then he digs into a new Cambridge University Press study, “Bot or Not?”, which found that readers not only struggle to tell human-written stories from AI-generated ones — they may actually prefer the AI versions.
Listen to the Podcast: Indie Manga Alliance Launches
Show Notes
The Independent Manga Alliance
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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 Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to another Self-Publishing News podcast, in what feels like it is becoming a commentary on academic articles, because boy, do we have an exciting survey and research paper for you today. But before that, two pieces of good news. And the first is the launch of the Indie Manga Alliance.
Indie Manga Alliance Launches in the US
So manga is obviously a form of writing that has been growing in popularity outside of Japan for some considerable time now. And the growth of online platforms like Webtoon has made it easier for people to publish graphic novels in general online and for people to self-publish in digital format, and it is something that obviously indies are also doing in print.
And in recognition of that, we have the launch of a group in the US, initially five independent publishers, but they want obviously to become a much broader organization than that, representing every writer and publisher of manga outside of the mainstream and outside of large publishers.
So I will put a link, I'll send Howard a link, to a survey that they're carrying out, which basically asks what it is that you would like to see in an organization that is dedicated to the interests of manga creators and publishers specifically in the indie sphere. And it's a survey that makes clear that they welcome responses from authors and illustrators, and therefore I highly recommend, if that is you, that you take part and help shape the future of what such an alliance might look like.
Libro.fm Expands Into E-books
So that's the first piece of good news, that we now have a group dedicated to representing the interests of all you manga authors and illustrators out there. Second is the expansion of Libro.fm. So Libro.fm is a platform dedicated to audiobooks, and it is very much like Bookshop.org, so much like Bookshop.org that it has in the past and currently still partnered with Bookshop.org in that it is dedicated to enabling people to buy from anywhere in the world and have a portion of the price that they pay for their books, in Libro.fm's case, audiobooks, go to an indie bookstore of their choice.
So Bookshop.org have partnered with Libro.fm in order to use them to fulfill audiobook orders. So if you click on buying audiobooks from Bookshop.org, it will send you through to Libro.fm. But that's not the current news. The current news is that Libro have moved, or are moving, into the e-book sphere.
So they are creating their own e-book platform, again on the same basis, that it is a subscription. If you have a Libro subscription, you will be able to toggle between buying e-books and buying audiobooks with the credits that you get on that subscription, and a slice of the price of your credit will go to an indie bookstore of your choice, so the same principle there.
At the moment, this is being launched in beta, and it's being launched to indie bookstores, who will be able to receive advanced copies of e-books and then presumably talk customers through and figure out what it is that people would want from such a platform when it then rolls out to customers in 2027.
So obviously, this is part of the ongoing trend to enable people to buy in all formats from wherever they want to buy. It's also part of the trend that looks to enable readers to stay loyal to both indie authors and indie bookstores. So you obviously can make your audiobooks available through Libro.fm.
I imagine that it is going to be possible to make your e-books available too. What is not clear is what this will mean for the partnership with Bookshop, because Bookshop obviously have their own e-book platform. So you might imagine a reciprocal agreement whereby Bookshop go to Libro for their audiobooks, Libro go to Bookshop for their e-books.
Libro will be in, you might say, direct competition with Bookshop when it comes to e-books. So what that might mean for the audio sphere, who knows? It would be lovely to think that this is an expansion of the ways in which people can support their favorite authors and support their favorite bookstores and not a competition.
But obviously that remains to be seen when the platform goes live to a wider public in 2027. But anyway, still, this is good news. More ways for you to get your books in front of readers who are conscious not only of the authors they buy from and publishers they buy from, but of the bookstores and platforms who benefit from their purchase.
Readers Struggle to Spot AI-Written Stories
So we know there are customers like that. We also, however, now know that there are readers who not only can't tell the difference between human-written content and AI content, but seem to prefer the content that is generated by AI. So this is the conclusion of the latest academic paper, which is doing the rounds and raising all kinds of doom and gloom.
So the paper is called Bot or Not? Can People Tell the Difference Between Stories Written by a Human or by an AI System? It is written by Sydney Sears and Dina Skolnick Weisberg, and it is published by Cambridge University Press. And the answer, it will not surprise you, is no, it seems that they can't.
So a number of studies were carried out. In the first study, this was 1,682 people taking part. They were given one story to read. They were given either an AI-generated or a human-written story. And they were then told either that it was written by ChatGPT or told that it was written by a human, and then they were told to assess what they thought of their story.
And they were asked to say, “Was the story high quality? Was it absorbing?” And it turns out that stories that they were told were human written but were in actual fact written by AI are the ones that came out on top, and they were rated the highest of all on both measures, suggesting that actually there is a perceived value in human authorship, but that that value doesn't carry across to the actual content.
And there's obviously lots of speculation as to why it is that people might prefer stories written by AI, and some of that speculation has sort of focused on things like simplicity and clarity. Obviously, simplicity and clarity appeal to some readers. They don't necessarily appeal to all readers, and a lot of readers actually prefer the complexity and the nuance and the messiness of writing that matches human life.
Nonetheless, that was a very, very interesting finding, and the other studies were equally interesting. In the second set of studies, they were given a story, and they were asked to read it without being told whether it was written by a human or by AI and then to try and guess whether it was written by a human or AI.
And this is where the “bot or not” comes in. Needless to say, people were not able to discern which was which. What they were also asked to do was to say whether they considered themselves experts in literature or experts in technology. And this is, again, something really, really interesting, that the self-rated experts in AI were actually better than random at working out which was which in terms of the stories.
But people who rated themselves as experts in literature came out as basically they might as well have stuck a pin in the paper and had a guess. So that, again, is being taken with a lot of hand-wringing. Whether that hand-wringing is justified, I'm not sure. What is clear, though, as I've said many times, and as I said when people were still making the argument that AI will never appeal to readers, is that those days when we say AI can't produce anything that anyone would want to read are long gone, and we do have to, as the authors of the survey put it, have a serious conversation about the nature of creativity itself.
And with that, I will leave you to go and ponder the nature of creativity itself, and I look forward to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
