On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explains how the European Accessibility Act will impact authors selling into the EU, with practical tips on accessible formats and why EPUB matters more than ever. He also covers a major U.S. court ruling against Anthropic for scraping copyrighted books—while still declaring its AI-generated content fair use.
Listen to the Podcast: European Accessibility Act Now in Force
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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: What better way to spend a scorching summer afternoon than to talk about my favorite topic. Welcome to the Self-Publishing News podcast, where we are going to be discussing just that, my favorite topic, European Union legislation, because this weekend, gone as it now is, the European Accessibility Act came into force across the European Union.
Whether you are based in the European Union or not, this almost certainly will affect you, because almost all of us are selling into the European Union, and this affects everyone who is doing that and selling into the EU.
So, what does this act say? What does it require from us? What does it not require from us?
I would say that my colleague, Roz Morris, has a great piece up on the ALLi website. I will endeavor to remember to send Howard the link so that he can link to that, which is a great Q&A session on the Accessibility Act, written earlier this year, that basically covers everything you need to know, but I will go over some of the key areas.
Understanding the European Accessibility Act
Dan Holloway: So, the European Accessibility Act, it's been in the works for many years now. It was passed some months ago and has come into law in the European Union now.
What this states briefly is that all digital products need to be accessible for as many users as possible, and the principles which govern accessibility in this case are the same principles that W3C, the Worldwide Web Consortium, use for their Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG as they're commonly known as, and I'm sure I will be calling them through this podcast.
So, the WCAG guidelines have four founding principles, which are perceivability, operability, understandability, and robustness.
The eagle eared amongst you will have realized that this does what American organizations love to do more than anything, and that is form an acronym, and that acronym is P.O.U.R. Pour as in pour a jug of tea rather than poor, as in what writers tend to be.
So, what do these things mean?
Perceivability basically means that all audiences should be able to take in the information that you are trying to convey. So, this is irrespective, for example, of sensory issues that the audience might have. So, people with hearing difficulty need to be able to understand audiobooks. People who are visually impaired need to be able to understand eBooks, and this means such things as including alternative text for images.
Operability, this basically is how you use the product and the most commonly cited example of this is that things need to be able to be navigated by keyboard shortcuts as well as by mouse. It also matters how we lay our books out, so using headings that are navigable, for example.
Any of us who've been dealing with Amazon in the last few years will probably be already very familiar with creating lots of headings to help people navigate through books because this was a requirement on Amazon ever since they changed the table of content rules because of content stuffing that was going on around KDP Select.
So, this is something we should already be familiar with.
Understandability: that basically means that people should be able to find their way around stuff. Things should be intuitive to use. They should be laid out in a way that people can understand.
A really good example of this is using links that say what they do. So, rather than saying, download here, where the only thing that is underlined is the word here, you're saying, click the highlighted link to download a copy of the latest report on audiobook sales in Finland, for example. Again, something we're probably getting used to already.
Finally, robust, and this is something that, in my dealings with technical companies, people struggle with most. It basically means that content should be compatible with a wide variety of devices and operating systems and assistive and other technology.
So, that means that most people using most browsers should be able to use your eBook. This is probably something that authors struggle with less than a lot of other companies I deal with in terms of accessibility, who test things on the latest version of every browser as though everyone has the latest version of every browser.
So, those are the four principles. Everything else flows from those. So, if you are following those principles, you should be covered.
The other thing that should cover you is if you are following the WCAG guidelines, we will make sure there is a link to those also, but you probably don't need to worry too much about the detail of those because a lot of the companies that we are used to using are doing their very best to be compliant already.
For example, Draf2Digital have been really leading the way on this. If you make your books available through Draft2Digital, they will make sure that they are accessible for the markets you want to sell them in, and that's great.
The Role of Formats in Accessibility
Dan Holloway: Again, and this is something that Roz has pointed out in her column, if you use formats like epub, this is the format that is run and maintained by W3C, that will be compatible with the devices that needs to be compatible with, the technologies it needs to be compatible with, because the same team essentially that runs WCAG, also runs epub. So, this is another reason to move away from proprietary file formats and just use something like epub.
PDFs, this is probably the one thing that most people are going to struggle with. PDFs, by and large, are not good with assistive technology. They struggle with headings. They struggle with navigability. They struggle with things like changing font size, changing background. So, they are generally designed for print. This is why printers like PDFs of your print ready copy. PDFs are designed for printers. They're not designed for electronic reading, although that's what most of us use them for all the time.
People do sell PDFs, but usually they sell them when they're selling direct. The most common use of the selling of PDFs is in educational and training materials. So, course books will frequently come as A PDF, for example. So, if you sell courses, the course book will come as a PDF.
It's probably, without disparaging anyone who does sell PDFs, and really great content PDFs, it's probably not an accident that a lot of the slightly iffy advice out there, to use the technical term, on how to make money through eBooks advises taking what you know and turning it into a PDF to sell it. That's not really how you do it.
As Roz points out, PDF should not be the only format of your eBook. So yes, very well said. I couldn't have said it better.
Consequences of Non-Compliance
Dan Holloway: So, if you don't do all this, what will happen to you? Let's face it, probably nothing.
In theory, you could be fined, and you could be fined a significant amount of money, thousands of euros. Probably the worst that's going to happen to writers who fail to comply is something in the middle, which will be that accounts are excluded from selling into those markets. So, that's the most likely thing that is going to happen.
But accessibility is a good thing. I do a lot of work on accessibility in my non-ALLi time. It's something I'm very passionate about. It's great to see a piece of legislation that is really taking it seriously.
So, that's most of the news and it's on, as I say, my favorite topic, European legislation.
AI and Copyright Rulings
Dan Holloway: There is some news on nobody's, or not many people's, favorite topic, AI and AI rulings, and that is that one of the high-profile court cases was ruled on this week. The ruling on the case against Anthropic has thrown up some interesting thoughts.
So, there are three key things that have been ruled.
This is a case that was brought by three authors who were claiming that the use of copyrighted works to train Claude, which Anthropic’s large language model would basically be uncompetitive, I think was sort of the TLDR of their case. It was going to churn out works that were competing with and detrimental to their own sales.
So, it wasn't strictly case brought under copyright law, and that's important because when it comes to copyright, the judge found that Anthropic had basically pirated a load of books, and it pirated a load of books by using shadow libraries like Library Genesis (LibGen). So, this is going to be an interesting foreshadowing, if you forgive the pun, of the Meta case later in the year.
It is likely that Anthropic are going to be landed with a big bill that could run into billions of dollars for having done so.
That said, on the substantive matter of the case, which is whether it was okay to use copyrighted books to produce new outputs, the judges ruled that, yep, Anthropic did nothing wrong, what they did constitutes fair use.
So, not necessarily the way they got the copyrighted books, but using copyrighted books is fair use because, and this is a saying that everyone is going to be quoting, the use to which Anthropic put it is, ” transformative”.
Transformative is, of course, what something needs to be in order to be justified.
The judge has gone the extra mile and said that the output that comes from models like Claude is spectacularly transformative.
So, that is going to cause some eyebrows to be raised. But the key point that the judge seems to be making is that anything that comes out isn't going to be in direct competition. It's not going to be like enough to those authors books that is going to be in direct competition with them.
So, there we go. There are many more rulings to come. I will bring you news on all of them, but that's a good place to leave it for now.
I look forward very much to speaking to you again at the same time next week.
Thank you.
