Dan Holloway

This author has written 968 articles
Amazon Rips Up Rare Books

News Podcast: Amazon Rips Up Rare Books to Train AI; Kobo Returns to Best Buy Blurb

On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway rounds up a busy week for indie authors: the rise of "Summerween," BookTok's new blend of sunny settings and Gothic dread; Kobo's return to big-box retail through Best Buy; and the report that Amazon has been ripping up and shredding books, including rare out-of-print titles, to train its AI. He also digs into KDP trend data showing dystopian fiction bouncing back and self-published titles claiming 38 percent of the US top 100, and closes with Ingram's new Covered platform, which puts digital advance copies in front of 50,000 booksellers and librarians.
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Destroying Books To Train AI

News Summary: Are Amazon and Other AI Companies Destroying Books to Train AI?

In one of those “I thought everyone knew that already” stories, this week the book world has been up in arms at revelations that the AI industry is training its large language models, where digital titles aren’t available, on physical books. Firms are buying copies of print books and then destroying them as they scan them into their computers. Some of the titles ending up subjected to this fate are exceedingly rare and have been out of print for decades.
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Ingram Launches Covered

News Summary: Ingram Launches Covered, Amazon Changes Bestseller Updates

Ingram has now launched its long-touted Covered platform. Covered is an alternative to platforms like NetGalley that offer advance copies of books. It will have a digital focus, initially offering ebooks in EPUB and PDF formats, with audiobooks expected to follow in the near future. The platform will be open to Ingram’s network of 50,000 or so booksellers and librarians, who will be able to order copies of books they like based on the advance reading the platform enables them to do.
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Summerween

News Summary: Summerween, Lit Circle, and Kobo Bring New Options for Readers

As summer comes to an end, thoughts for many of us as readers and writers turn to “spooky season.” But what if you just can’t wait till the evenings really draw in (or indeed out in the Southern Hemisphere) to get your fangs stuck into some ghoulish books? Well, it seems that the latest trend on BookTok is just for you. “Summerween” is a portmanteau named (apparently) for an episode of the animated series Gravity Falls.
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Self-Publishing Partnership Stops Trading

News Podcast: Self-Publishing Partnership Stops Trading; Anthropic Watermarks Claude’s AI Text

On this week's Self-Publishing News podcast, ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway reports on the collapse of Self-Publishing Partnership, a UK-based service provider that ceased trading at the end of June, leaving authors waiting on royalties and raising questions about why no administrators were brought in. The Society of Authors has launched a campaign to help affected members recover what they're owed. Then Dan turns to Anthropic's announcement that it will watermark all text generated by Claude — a move driven in part by the EU's AI Act, and one that could eventually help platforms like Amazon identify AI-generated books.
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Anthropic Adds Watermarks

News Summary: Anthropic Adds Watermarks to Claude’s AI-Generated Text

Watermarks are one of the oldest technologies designed to offer proof of something’s origins. Centuries after their first use on banknotes, stamps, and luxury writing papers, the concept of the watermark has found a valuable place in the digital world, where copying is easy and proof of provenance hard. In the book world, we are most familiar with the watermark concept taking the form of DRM (digital rights management), an additional layer applied to a digital file to prevent copying or manipulation.
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Self-Publishing Partnership

News Summary: Self-Publishing Partnership Collapse Leaves Authors Waiting for Royalties

As indie authors, we might not depend on publishers for our paperwork, but we can be very dependent upon the platforms we use to publish, distribute, and then pay us for our books. And when those platforms run into trouble, it can create a real headache. The most recent time this happened was with the slow-motion car crash that brought Unbound to a halt. Thanks to The Bookseller for drawing my attention to the latest and providing some hope for those affected by it.
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Spotify Adds AI Discovery Tools

News Summary: Spotify Adds AI Discovery Tools and Series Features for Audiobook Listeners

Spotify is rolling out new features again for its audiobook listeners. AI is, of course, grabbing most of the headlines, as always. The new AI feature it has introduced is called “Prompted Playlist,” and it essentially does exactly what you would imagine. It lets listeners ask Spotify to create an audiobook playlist for them for the year using a very wide set of parameters.
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Indie Manga Alliance Launches

News Podcast: Indie Manga Alliance Launches, Libro.fm Adds E-books, and Readers Fail to Spot AI Stories

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.
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AI-Generated Stories

News Summary: AI-Generated Stories Outperform Human Writing in Reader Ratings

A week is, as the saying goes, a long time in politics. In technology, it is positively an aeon. Just last week, we were talking about the study of more than 14,000 self-published titles by Tuhin Chakrabarty that, while suggesting AI was generating commercial pressure on indie authors, found that sales of titles with signs of AI generation were lower than those of their human-authored counterparts.
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