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Deals With OpenAI

Self-Publishing News: NYT Sues ‘Confusing’ Puzzle to Protect Wordle; Other Media Companies Sign Deals with OpenAI

I’ve often said I find it fascinating how themes can emerge that make one week’s news different from another. This week, that theme is media being, shall we say, unchilled. And yes, I am very much aware that, in writing this, at the risk of evoking the spirit of Judge Dredd, I am the media. But whatever other parlousness I may succumb to, I hope I am guilty of neither of these. The first is something I’ve covered a few times and fear I will be covering a few more. And that’s the willingness of media companies to sign deals with OpenAI allowing their content to be used to train its generative AI. This week, Vox Media and The Atlantic signed deals. They join the likes of Axel Springer, News Corp, Le Monde, and the Financial Times.
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Facebook's AI Policy

Self-Publishing News: Facebook’s AI Policy Sparks Controversy Among Creatives

If a week is a long time in politics, then in the world of technology, Facebook's AI policy sparking controversy among creatives might as well be “living memory.” This means we’re going back to the times of the sagas since we last ran a story on AI. I didn’t even run a story when the whole furore following the launch of ChatGPT-4o (which I did cover) broke as Scarlett Johansson spotted that the voice of the demo sounded a heck of a lot like her, despite her having said she didn’t want to work with OpenAI.
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Print Sales

Self-Publishing News: Romantasy Popularity Steadies Print Sales

Last week, we looked at the figures for electronic book sales and the ways in which they are notoriously misleading in their official format. This week, there’s an interesting glimpse into print sales, particularly the genres driving the healthy levels of those sales. Thanks to Porter Anderson over at Publishing Perspectives for outlining the details of an analysis of print sales by the entertainment analysis group Circana.
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Sustainability

Self-Publishing News: Sustainability Back in the Literary Spotlight

It has recently been impossible to ignore the fact that the literary and political worlds are intertwined in complex ways. While the geopolitical events at the heart of the most recent entanglements, from Ukraine to Gaza, are new and of our time, the nature of the entanglement remains timeless. Authors are fiercely independent and opinionated beings. We have to be. Yet the publishing industry is reliant on large corporations whose financial dealings are often at odds with many of those opinions. Sustainability back in publishing.
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Spotify Audiobooks

Self-Publishing News: Spotify Expands Audiobook Catalog, Dissecting E-Book Figures, and OverDrive Hits 4 Billion Downloads

We end this week with a round-up of some very interesting news and figures from the world of electronic books (e- and audio-). As we have already been talking about them this week, let’s start with the big news about Spotify. Their audiobook premium subscription now includes titles from the catalog of Bonnier UK. This is the UK division, but Bonnier, of course, is one of the Nordic giants of publishing. Interestingly, they seem to be joined on the Spotify list by Blackstone Publishing.
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Amazon Antitrust

Self-Publishing News: Booksellers Pile on Amazon, Everyone Piles on Apple

It won’t have escaped your notice that Amazon is currently, as it regularly is, subject to an antitrust complaint from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The complaint, as it stands, alleges that Amazon uses its giant market share to squeeze out competition, damaging the business ecosystem and preventing rivals from competing with it through price manipulation. There is also an interesting allegation that its own price-cutting damages sellers by reducing their margins to wafer thin.
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Online Safety Act

Self-Publishing News: UK Online Safety Act’s Impact on Content and ByteDance’s Challenge to US Legislation

So far this month, we have seen developments in two stories I’ve covered before that sit together under the heading, “Laying Down the Law for Tech Platforms.” I’ll start close to home here in the UK with the latest in the ongoing saga of the Online Safety Act. This is the UK’s legislation that seeks to protect vulnerable people, especially children, while they are online, by stopping them from encountering material that is “legal but harmful.” The recently implemented act required technology firms to take steps to ensure children were better protected online than adults.
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