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Critical PHP Vulnerability

News Summary: Critical PHP Vulnerability Affects 70% of Web — What Authors with WordPress Sites Need to Do

I will caveat this by saying I am not an IT expert. On the other hand, the aftermath of the disclosure of the PHP flaw last week is something that has affected most people as users of the internet, and quite possibly many of you who have your own websites. It's a big enough story that it needs addressing, at the same time as ensuring that the information conveyed is accurate.
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Society Of Authors Defends AI Charter

News Summary: Society of Authors Defends AI Charter; Books By People Launches Human Authorship Label

This week in "who could possibly have seen it coming," there has been a reaction against the Charter of Ethical AI Use I reported on at the end of last week. The Charter seeks to set standards it wanted companies working in the industry to adhere to if they do use AI, such as transparency, consent, and licensing arrangements with creators.
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Anne Carson Wins Nobel

News Summary: Anne Carson Wins Nobel; Pangram CEO Claims Minimal False Positives; Ghostwriters Lose Lower-End Work to AI

As well as being conference season, it is of course "that time of year" in another way familiar to all of us who follow literary events. Last week saw the Nobel committee announce its annual roster of prizes, including that for literature. So congratulations to Anne Carson, whose winning citation praises her "bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature."
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Audiobooks Drive Cross-Format Reading

News Summary: Audible’s NielsenIQ Report Finds Audiobooks Drive Cross-Format Reading; Human Narrators Still Matter

Audiobook companies like to publish numbers with two kinds of finding. First, that the audiobook market is expanding. And second that they as a company are responsible for a large amount of the good stuff they have just demonstrated. Spotify has so far been the leader in this field, but Frankfurt Book Fair saw Audible jump headlong into the space with a much-vaunted report commissioned from NielsenIQ that was launched there.
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Smashwords Adds Pre-Orders

News Summary: Smashwords Adds Pre-Orders; Spotify Expands Audiobooks to 180 Countries

Big news from a couple of the big platforms we use to round off the week. First comes a press release from Draft2Digital that brings the announcement that Smashwords will be accepting pre-orders for the first time. For me this brings all kinds of nostalgia. Like many indies who started in the late aughts, well into the internet era but before Kindle, Smashwords was the platform through which I made my first ever sale. I still occasionally wake up with cold sweats about its Meatgrinder (if you know, you know). So it's great to see them still moving forward.
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OpenAI Moves To Strike AI Market Study

News Summary: OpenAI Moves to Strike AI Market Study; BISG Survey Shows Indies Use AI Mainly for Marketing

"Follow the money" is often a wise phrase when it comes to evaluating studies, and one I advocate regularly in this column (alongside the slightly more arch "they would say that"). Last week saw a rather unexpected development along those lines, as OpenAI decided they wanted to invoke the principle in relation to ongoing legal suits. Specifically, they have requested that courts set aside a study we've heard a lot about: Tuhin Chakrabarty's paper on the impact of generative AI on the book market.
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ALLi's SelfPubCon Opens October 17

News Summary: ALLi’s SelfPubCon Opens October 17 with Jane Friedman Keynote

The clock is ticking down to Frankfurter Buchmesse. And that means the countdown is also underway to ALLi's annual SelfPubCon. Running on October 17–18, SelfPubCon this year tackles a single question that has been implicit in almost everything I've been reporting on this year: what is the future of self-publishing? The conference subheading is "What's Working Now and What's Next," while the strapline gets right to the point: Two days. One question: where is indie publishing going, and how do you go with it?
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