Bookshop.org Expands to E-Books; Authors Guild Launches Human Authored Certification: The Self-Publishing with ALLi Podcast Featuring Dan Holloway

On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on Bookshop.org’s new support for e-books, giving indie authors more ways to reach readers while supporting local bookstores. He also covers the U.S. Copyright Office’s latest report on AI and copyright, which outlines how current laws apply to AI-assisted works, and the Authors Guild’s new Human Authored certification, designed to provide transparency about AI-generated content in books.

Listen to Self-Publishing with ALLi: Bookshop.org Expands to E-Books

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About the Host

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.

Read the Transcripts

Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to this week's Self-Publishing News where we're going to be talking about copyright, or rather copyrightability, the nature of humanity, and eBook opportunities.

Bookshop.org Now Accepting eBooks

You will have noticed, I'm sure, that there was a little switch around in the news last week. That last week's podcast didn't necessarily match up with the order of posts from last week's column, and that was because we had some very exciting news towards the end of last week, which is that bookshop.org have opened their platform to eBooks. Bookshop.org, which has been going, I think, now for five years. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's longer than five years, although one of the columns I saw said that it had been five years. It has been going, in some version or other for more than five years, but it really took off during the pandemic, or at the very start of the pandemic.

Bookshop.org, of course, is the company that allows you to buy books wherever you are, and a slice of the sale of those books go to a local independent bookshop anywhere that's part of the scheme. So, you could be in Wisconsin, and you could buy a copy of the latest Rebecca Yarros, just to use an example, and it will arrive on your doorstep from a wholesaler somewhere, but the slice of sales that would normally go to whatever bookshop you bought it from, could go to a bookstore of your choosing in Chicago.

So, yes, it's one of those initiatives that has always felt like it fits well with the indie ethos, even though it's actually been quite hard to benefit from it.

So, it's an indie feeling app that benefits indie bookstores, but one of the things that's stopped a lot of indie authors really engaging with it is the fact that up until now, it has been limited to physical books. So, it has been possible to get physical books listed on bookshop.org.

I think there were some difficulties a few years ago, if you will remember from my column, there was quite a lot of upheaval in the wholesaling and distribution business of physical books. You had to be on, I think, the gardener's catalogue, but not just on the catalogue, you then had to get specially listed from that catalogue onto the bookshop.org site, and it was all quite difficult for a lot of indies to negotiate and to make sure their books were listed in the right place.

So, it's never really quite worked out as it should have done. But now eBooks are going to be distributed or are going to be able to be read by a bookshop.org app.

So, the way it works is you have to buy your eBook through the bookshop.org website. The reason they're doing it through that, rather than the new e-reader app which you can download to read the book in, is to basically avoid giving a large cut of the money to the App Store or to Google, which they would have to do if you were buying in app.

But you buy like that, you can read it in the app, and a slice of the sales from the eBook go to an indie bookstore of the reader's choosing.

It's a really good way for indies to actually start to get involved in this scheme. It starts to feel more like an ecosystem of us and independent bookstores and readers and technology firms working together to all make each other's lives easier.

You will be able to do that if your books are available as eBooks through Ingram Spark and Draft2Digital.

So, those are the ones listed on the bookshop.org site as being the places to publish your book through to make it available there.

There will be some restrictions, obviously, proprietary and DRM-enabled books that are bought on Kindle, places like that, readers won't be able to read there. But you can push it out to the bookshop.org site if you make your books available through Ingram Spark or Draft2Digital, and we can all benefit each other in the indie world, and that sounds fabulous.

So that was really exciting news at the end of last week. There's been lots of other news.

US Copyright Office Issues Copyrightability Report

So, the US Copyright Office has issued the second of its reports on copyright and AI. It's entitled, delightfully, Copyrightability, and it's based on 10,000 comments from writers, publishers, and libraries.

All sorts of interesting recommendations about what it understands the current law on AI and copyright to be, where it considers there needs to be a change in legislation, how it expects future cases to go, and so on.

Basically, first off, they think existing law is good enough when it comes to copyright and AI.

The one that really caught my eye is this one, the use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output. So, if you use AI tools, it doesn't say what those tools are, but my guessing is this is not generative AI, you can copyright the output, and they expect that to be upholdable legally.

The other one that really caught my eye, human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.

So, basically that seems to speak to some of the things that authors have been claiming in some of the more high-profile lawsuits, such as this output could only have been trained on my work because it clearly seems to be replicating things that it could only have learned from my work.

More pertinently, probably less controversially, it will clearly apply to prompts of the kind, write me something in the style of, if that in the style of is a work that is still in copyright, rather than something like in the style of Proust or something that's out of copyright, then the person in whose style the output comes would appear to have some sort of copyright claim to the output.

That's how I read that.

Really interesting stuff. Do go and have a listen to everything Matty says about it.

Human Authored Certification Launched by The Authors Guild

Also, on the subject of AI, the Authors Guild has launched its Human Authored Certification. So, Human Authored is basically a way you can go, at the moment only if you're an Authors Guild member, although they are going to be expanding it. You can go through a portal, you can give them the details of your book and they will give you back a number, and that number is your unique identifier proof that the book concerned has been written by a genuine human being.

So, this is intended as a way of helping readers by giving them transparency about the nature of what it is they are reading.

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, puts it, the Human Authored Initiative isn't about rejecting technology, it's about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader's desire for human connection and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling.

So yes, that and the Copyrightability Report, taken together, seem to suggest a landscape in which we are seeing a crystallization of assistive AI on the one hand and generative AI on the other hand, which is what's been there. We've got used to that with Amazon's distinction between the two.

If you remember, they require you to declare one but not the other if you're publishing your work to KDP.

A really interesting initiative. I will, of course, report when it does open up wider than two members of the Authors Guild, and it will be very interesting to see how many people actually use it, and any surveys on readers habits that find out whether readers value this kind of information.

So, yeah, lots to chew over in the news this week. Who knows what next week will bring, and I didn't even mention Deep Seek until now. So, there we go. Maybe that will be in the news again even more next week.

Whatever happens though, have a lovely week and I will speak to you then. Goodbye.