Dan Holloway

This author has written 908 articles
Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Growth

News Podcast: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Growth; ElevenLabs Expands; AI Copyright Cases Narrow the Class

: On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway reports on Spotify's investor day, where the company credited its Page Match feature for a 60 percent rise in audiobook listening hours, notes ElevenLabs' quiet expansion as a listening platform in its own right, and examines a troubling trend in AI copyright class actions — where increasingly narrow eligibility requirements around ISBN registration and Copyright Office filings are leaving many indie and overseas authors out of the picture.
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ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles

News Summary: ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles; Readers Can Swap Narrators for AI Voices

This week's second story is less legally dense and full of plot twists than our first. But no less important. At the center of it is ElevenLabs, the AI-generated voice giant. You will recall that ElevenLabs was in the news last week because of its audiobook partnership with Spotify. This week, a reminder that ElevenLabs is, itself, an audiobook platform thanks to its Eleven Reader app.
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Indie Authors May Be Excluded From AI Copyright Class Actions

News Summary: Writer Beware Warns Indie Authors May Be Excluded from AI Copyright Class Actions

Thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing toward the Writer Beware piece that forms the basis for this week's first story. Class action lawsuits taken out by rights holders against tech companies for alleged violations related to copyright law committed in pursuit of the development of large generative AI models. That's a general description of what we've seen a lot in the news. And we will be seeing it a lot more.
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Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth

News Summary: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth; Page Match Feature Drives Engagement

One reason Spotify has been in the news a fair bit of late is that May 21 was its Investor Day. That's the time each year when they make big announcements about the year ahead, such as reported in my earlier post on the ElevenLabs deal. And it's when they look back and highlight the things they are proudest of in the previous year. And that's what I'm looking at today.
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Spotify Expands AI Audiobook Tools

News Podcast: Spotify Expands AI Audiobook Tools; Barnes & Noble Contradicts Itself on AI; Commonwealth Prize Controversy

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway covers a week dominated by AI controversy: Spotify's expanded ElevenLabs partnership for seamless AI audiobook creation, Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt's muddled attempt to clarify his store's AI book policy, and a Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner accused of using AI — and why Dan thinks the organizers got their response exactly right.
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Korean Publishers Embrace AI

News Summary: Korean Publishers Embrace AI as ‘Reader’; Barnes and Noble Clarifies AI Book Policy

Last week saw a highly controversial statement from Kim Tae-Heon, president of the Korean Publishers Association. In the statement, Kim refers to the emergence of AI as "reader." This has, of course, caused considerable rumblings among those who feel he has not done adequate justice to the rapacious nature of the technology and the companies who control it.
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Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool

News Summary: Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool; Voice Actors Sue AI Companies

Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: "Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts."
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Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused Of Using AI

News Summary: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused of Using AI; Judges Face Impossible Dilemma

This week I feel we reached the peak "oh good grief, what now?" moment of the AI scandal hypercycle. And to be honest, I am genuinely not sure whether the whole thing feels more Woodward and Bernstein or Arthur Miller. In short, this week we saw serious shade cast on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Jamir Nazir. Nazir's story, "The Serpent in the Grove," was straightaway called out by several highly qualified people for being AI-generated.
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AI-Powered Scams Target Writers

News Podcast: AI-Powered Scams Target Writers; Audible Opens Pop-Up Bookstore; Anthropic Fairness Hearing Update

On this episode of Self-Publishing with ALLi, Dan Holloway opens with an urgent warning from Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss about two new AI-generated scams targeting authors — one involving fake radio show invitations, one involving fraudulent book fair representation — and explains the telltale signs that give them away. He then reports on Audible's StoryHouse, a pop-up audiobook store in New York's Bowery modeled on a vinyl record shop, and closes with an update on the Anthropic settlement fairness hearing, including concerns about the $3,000 per-title payout and the US copyright registration requirement that overseas authors say is unfair to them.
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Anthropic Settlement Clears Fairness Hearing

News Summary: Anthropic Settlement Clears Fairness Hearing; Payout Expected for 93% of Eligible Titles

The Anthropic settlement has just jumped through one of the final hoops before people can expect the courts to order payment. May 14 saw the so-called "fairness" hearing. Now I will preface this as always by saying I am not an expert in the law, and certainly not US as opposed to UK law. On the other hand I've read a lot of coverage of legal cases over the years of reporting for this column (and even in my spare time).
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Bookless Bookstore

News Summary: Audible Opens ‘Bookless Bookstore’ Pop-Up in New York’s Bowery

My literary heart is, and has always been, torn between two worlds. On the one hand is the sensory delight of the dark, dusty library that started with an almost sacred room in my parents' house and has brought me to and kept me in the myriad libraries of Oxford, where I've spent four decades losing myself in physical text. But there is also nothing quite like the electricity of a live show. Which is why I spent more than a decade running spoken word shows, and why anything that brings the book to a live audience will grab my attention.
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AI-Generated Scams

News Summary: New AI-Generated Scams Target Authors with Fake Book Fair and Radio Invitations

Thanks to Nate Hoffelder's morning coffee for the heads-up on a new warning from everyone's favorite scambuster, Victoria Strauss. The subject of her latest exposé is two more entries into the increasingly overstuffed canon of AI-generated scams targeting authors. Both of these follow the same trajectory. They begin with a very eloquently composed (or, at least, composed without the scam signs we've been told to look out for over decades) email request. And end, of course, with a special deal and some bonus extras, all for a reasonable (!) fee.
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