A few interesting pieces of news with which to end the week. The one I found most interesting is the long-anticipated release of the first (UK for now, following a trial in Germany) BookTok Bestseller list. In a shocking turn of events that no one could have foreseen, seventeen of the top twenty titles are romance and romantasy, with the likes of Rebecca Yarros, Chloe Walsh, and Sarah J. Maas dominating. It is also no surprise to see the ur-text of dark academia, Donna Tartt's The Secret History, standing proud in the chart.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
What is of note, as the blogger Romancing the Phone points out, is the lack of real new titles. Time will tell whether this trend continues. More to the point from an opportunity perspective, it remains to be seen whether having a chart narrows sales and focus on the platform or widens it as creators vie for influence with their “three books that you won't find on the bestseller chart” lists.
Publishers Sue Meta over AI Training
Second up we have the latest AI-related lawsuit. And it's an interesting one, brought by publishers against Meta. It centers on the issues brought to light by the leaked emails that made the news some while ago in which leading figures within Meta seemed to dismiss licensing the rights to copyright material for training the company's Llama AI, arguing that doing so would leave them unable to claim fair use.
Publishers are seeking to bring a class action with the aim of destroying infringing copies possessed by Meta and seeking damages. Authors are represented in the case, but it is not fully clear whether indies, as authors and publishers, will potentially be part of any class.
Student Reading App Trends
And finally, I was intrigued by a couple of things in a recent survey from Sora. That is, Sora the student library app from OverDrive, not the confusingly named but now deceased AI video app. The survey looked at what students were using the app to read and how they were reading. Alongside figures like the fact 85 percent of borrowing was e-books and 11 percent audio are insights such as the fact that over 628,000 students had set themselves reading targets. Whether this is a form of what we have in Oxford and no doubt elsewhere with reading groups and reading bootcamps, or a sign of the rise of productivity process rather than just doing the thing, who knows.
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