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Bonnier Buys Nextory

News Summary: Bonnier Buys Nextory, CDs Rebound, and a Goodreads Scam Targets Authors

We start with some big news in the audiobook sphere. That news comes from the world of Nordic audiobook companies, where Sweden’s Bonnier, owner of the BookBeat platform, has fully bought audiobook platform Nextory. That this was positioned in the Publishing Perspectives report on the story as a challenge to Storytel is a suitable reminder of just how dominant companies in that part of the world are in the audiobook market.
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Library E-Book Lending Hurts Book Sales

News Summary: New Study Says Library E-Book Lending Hurts Book Sales

The tale of libraries, e-books, and publishers is less a news story and more an album-length epic of prog rock. The TL;DR so far is: libraries say they are being asked to pay too much for e-books; publishers say they have to charge this much because libraries take away from retail sales; meanwhile, indies can set their own prices when they distribute to OverDrive and make our books a very attractive proposition.
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Google Play Books Launches Expert Intelligence

News Summary: Google Play Books Launches Expert Intelligence Ebook Function

Google Play Books is the latest ebook store to jump on the bandwagon of adding AI features that enable readers to interact with the books they are reading. Amazon has already introduced, you will remember, a Story So Far feature that acts as a recap for readers who want to be brought up to speed when they dive back into a book. That feature also allows you to ask about characters and plot arcs within the book you are reading.
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Delay Anthropic Payout

News Summary: Appeal Over Legal Fees Could Delay Anthropic Payout

We start the week with a bit of topping, tailing, and appendixing of some stories we’ve been following for a little while. First and most significantly comes news from the Anthropic case that could have a direct impact, with thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing to the story. It seems as though there might be an appeal in this case. But it’s not coming from where you might expect: the tech giant liable to pay out the $1.5 billion settlement in the class action.
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News Summary: Survey Suggests Many Publishers Still Fail to Register Copyright

A very interesting postscript to the Anthropic case comes courtesy of a survey carried out by the Authors Guild. You will recall that one of the key defining factors of the eligible class in the class action was that copyright was registered in a timely fashion with the US Copyright Office. We know this meant a lot of otherwise eligible indie authors were denied compensation as a result of this.
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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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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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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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