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Books On LibGen

Authors Discover Their Books on LibGen, Raise Alarm Over AI Training: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

You’ve probably seen it all over your social media feed this week: light blue rectangular backgrounds with lists of books. Most of these posts feature the writers’ own titles, accompanied by commentary that often hits harder than anything in the books themselves. These are lists of books on LibGen, a piracy-linked site that’s back in the spotlight after a recent article provided a searchable database—allowing authors to see exactly which of their works are available there.
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Unbound

Unbound Goes into Administration, Leaving Writers Wondering About Payments: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This is a sad column to write. But perhaps not an unexpected one, given how little the company in question has featured in these articles in the past few years. A decade ago, when Unbound was still a relatively new venture, I was very excited to see one of its titles, Richard Kingsnorth’s The Wake, on the Booker Prize longlist and Goldsmiths Prize shortlist. Sadly, that was to be a high-water mark for the venture, which went into administration last week.
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AI Wrote A Story

AI Wrote a Story; People Had Feelings! Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

AI has been writing things for a long time now. Whatever that means. For several years, large numbers of online articles have been produced by machines. And dabblings in poetry and fictional prose are hardly unheard of. But this week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman released something written by what he describes as “a new model that is good at creative writing.” He also stated he didn’t yet know how or where the model would be released, but of course, writers have had thoughts and feelings aplenty.
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Spotify For Authors

Spotify for Authors Expands with New Short Audiobook Program: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Spotify has launched a new program aimed directly at indie authors. For a few months, I’ve been reporting on Spotify’s increasing appetite for courting indie authors. The Spotify for Authors platform has been adding tools. And recently, the streaming giant announced a deal with ElevenLabs to allow the firm’s AI-generated narration to be used for audiobooks, which indie authors could then upload through Spotify for Authors.
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Libro.fm

Libro.fm Sees Rapid Boom as Indie Bookstores Grow in Confidence: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

The article in Publishers Weekly, where I first came across this story, says that Libro.fm has a similar style to Bookshop.org (before I get too sanctimonious, I might add that a search reveals I said the same thing in an article in 2023). In actual fact, of course, Libro.fm has considerably more history than Bookshop.org. It’s also not “similar.” It’s actually Bookshop.org’s audiobook partner, enabling listeners to buy audiobooks from independent retailers.
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TikTok And Twitch

TikTok and Twitch Expand Monetization; Eleven Labs Launches Speech-to-Text: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

This week’s news seems to be all about tools that could help authors make more money. We started the week by looking at Eleven Labs’ big move into dealing directly with authors to create AI-generated e-books. Today, we are looking at a couple of other tools that caught my eye over the past week, including TikTok and Twitch, both of which are expanding opportunities for creators to monetize their work.
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AI Copyright

UK Publishers Push Back on AI Copyright; Academic Libraries Shift to Subscription Model: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Fittingly for a Saturday snack, there are several smaller pieces of news I want to round up. Here in the UK, the public consultation on AI copyright has just finished, and the Publishers Association’s Dan Conway has been vocal on what he thinks needs to happen. A quotation in The Times includes fighting talk such as, “The message to government is clear: the great copyright heist cannot go unchallenged…Big Tech needs to pay for the creative and research content they hoover up to train AI.”
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World Of Books

World of Books Expands in the US; The StoryGraph Gains Traction as a Goodreads Alternative: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

Midweek sees a couple of interesting, if low-key, stories. Many readers were expressing concern over Amazon as we ended last week after the change of terms removed Kindle book USB transfers from computer to e-reader. I hope we shed light on the story here, and it does feel that some of the absolute panic I saw on social media may have been a little overstated. But still, as people think of alternatives to the Amazon ecosystem, World of Books is expanding, and other options are emerging.
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