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AI Witch Hunt

News Summary: US Book Show Warns against AI Witch Hunt as Publishers Face Detection Dilemma

The start of this month saw the second staging of the much-vaunted US Book Show. There is already some great coverage out there, notably from Publishers Weekly, who hosted the show, and from Publishing Perspectives. I've also enjoyed reading Jane Friedman, who has been involved in the hosting. But I will try to pull out the highlights. Of course, AI was on the agenda. And the headlines from the show have been grabbed by the centerpiece panel featuring David Shelley, CEO of Hachette, which was the company at the heart of the Shy Girl storm.
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Authors Guild Report

News Summary: Authors Guild Report Finds Only 25% of Readers Paid for Their Last Book

A new Authors Guild report has reached a stark conclusion: most readers are not paying for the books they read. To put it bluntly, that would seem to be the conclusion of a report from the Authors Guild. The report is dated December 2025, but the press release only came out in the last week, suggesting that some crunching and considering has been going on in the interim. I'll have a look at the more noteworthy findings and what they suggest for us as authors (Publishers Weekly's headline on the piece clearly cites a connection to declining author incomes), but first I want to situate this somewhat.
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US Audiobook Sales Grow

News Summary: US Audiobook Sales Grow 9% to $2.43 Billion; Active Titles Up 43% as Revenue per Title Falls

I wrote recently about the 60 percent growth in audiobook listening reported by Spotify in 2025. This week we have figures on the whole of the audiobook market (in the US at least), which help to contextualize that growth. The figures come as the Audio Publishers Association announces the findings of its two annual surveys: hard data on sales from Toluna, and a comprehensive survey on listening habits from Edison Research.
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Libraries Challenge Big Five On E-book Pricing

News Summary: Libraries Challenge Big Five on E-book Pricing; Independent Bookstores Hit Highest Level since 1990s

How much should e-books cost? It's one of the most divisive questions of the past fifteen years or so (in our small corner of the world at least), right up there with perennials like pineapple on pizza. The sub-question of this wider question that caused so much angst just before Covid is how much libraries should pay for e-books. You will remember, I dare say, there was much talk for a while of metered usage, and anger at the limited licensing time covered by the purchase of an e-book.
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UK Competition Authority Imposes New Publisher Controls

News Summary: UK Competition Authority Imposes New Publisher Controls over Google’s AI Search Summaries

I tend not to cover national legislation stories, but this week's opener is a bit of a milestone. It will be of direct relevance to many and sets a fascinating legal precedent that everyone will want to track. In a landmark move, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has imposed the Publisher Conduct Requirement (CR), specifically aimed at Google and its use of AI summaries.
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ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles

News Summary: ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles; Readers Can Swap Narrators for AI Voices

This week's second story is less legally dense and full of plot twists than our first. But no less important. At the center of it is ElevenLabs, the AI-generated voice giant. You will recall that ElevenLabs was in the news last week because of its audiobook partnership with Spotify. This week, a reminder that ElevenLabs is, itself, an audiobook platform thanks to its Eleven Reader app.
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Indie Authors May Be Excluded From AI Copyright Class Actions

News Summary: Writer Beware Warns Indie Authors May Be Excluded from AI Copyright Class Actions

Thanks to Jane Friedman for pointing toward the Writer Beware piece that forms the basis for this week's first story. Class action lawsuits taken out by rights holders against tech companies for alleged violations related to copyright law committed in pursuit of the development of large generative AI models. That's a general description of what we've seen a lot in the news. And we will be seeing it a lot more.
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Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth

News Summary: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth; Page Match Feature Drives Engagement

One reason Spotify has been in the news a fair bit of late is that May 21 was its Investor Day. That's the time each year when they make big announcements about the year ahead, such as reported in my earlier post on the ElevenLabs deal. And it's when they look back and highlight the things they are proudest of in the previous year. And that's what I'm looking at today.
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Korean Publishers Embrace AI

News Summary: Korean Publishers Embrace AI as ‘Reader’; Barnes and Noble Clarifies AI Book Policy

Last week saw a highly controversial statement from Kim Tae-Heon, president of the Korean Publishers Association. In the statement, Kim refers to the emergence of AI as "reader." This has, of course, caused considerable rumblings among those who feel he has not done adequate justice to the rapacious nature of the technology and the companies who control it.
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Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool

News Summary: Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool; Voice Actors Sue AI Companies

Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: "Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts."
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Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused Of Using AI

News Summary: Commonwealth Short Story Prize Winner Accused of Using AI; Judges Face Impossible Dilemma

This week I feel we reached the peak "oh good grief, what now?" moment of the AI scandal hypercycle. And to be honest, I am genuinely not sure whether the whole thing feels more Woodward and Bernstein or Arthur Miller. In short, this week we saw serious shade cast on the Commonwealth Short Story Prize winner Jamir Nazir. Nazir's story, "The Serpent in the Grove," was straightaway called out by several highly qualified people for being AI-generated.
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