Before You Comment Online Again, Watch This

We end the week with a round-up that begins with a story I seem to have missed when it first broke at the start of April. It’s an interesting and highly relevant twist in the TikTok ownership saga. You will recall that we are currently in a ninety-day extension to the time at which the TikTok ban is scheduled to come into force. The condition for avoiding the ban is that TikTok in the US is sold to a company not based in China and uses a different algorithm from the one the ByteDance-owned company currently operates everywhere it is available.

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway reports that new US tariffs will not apply to printed books, thanks to an information exemption, though the impact on printing materials remains unclear. He covers Canva’s launch of AI tools following a pricing change, a legal brief challenging Meta’s use of copyrighted content, and Ingram’s new MediaScout platform, which showcases indie books for film and TV adaptation.

In my day job in higher education, I am, like many others, winding down for the holiday season. But in the book world, we seem to have stumbled into a particularly busy time for news. So expect more than one story from each column this week. I begin with particularly exciting news for indie authors looking to extract the maximum return from all of the rights they own in their work. Ingram has just gone live with its Mediascout program.