Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry? (publishersweekly.com) 50
There's at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher's Weekly.
Yet "While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges."
Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows... [The CEO of the Author's Guild called the partnership "a positive step forward in the legitimized use of books in the AI ecosystem to the benefit of readers, publishers, and authors alike."]
Of even more significance is the growing number of licensing deals publishers are striking with AI companies. In 2024, HarperCollins became the first of the Big Five to publicly reveal that it had signed a deal to license its content for AI training. The three-year agreement paid $5,000 per participating title, split equally between HarperCollins and the authors. Wiley announced its first AI licensing deal in 2024 and has since made several more. For fiscal year 2026, it reported earning $49 million in revenue from the deals. The company also has a number of strategic collaborations with companies including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, IQVIA, OpenEvidence, and others.
And publishers are even building in-house AI tools for producing royalty statements, proofreading, and providing customer service: In its 2025 Salary and Jobs Report, Publisher's Weekly reported that 63% of industry professionals surveyed said their organizations were using AI... Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group and CEO of Perfect Bound, has been a vocal advocate for the use of AI in publishing — despite calling himself a "hardcore techno-pessimist." He tells PW, "I do this because you use AI or you die at this point...." Like many in the industry, he maintains any use of AI must "start with a human and end with a human," and he draws a clear line, avoiding AI for core creative work, such as selecting titles, designing covers, or creating illustrations — reserving it for developmental editing, formatting, and admin instead... What is known is that each of the Big Five is developing proprietary AI systems for internal use, as proven by the numerous AI-related job openings the companies have posted... [And the parent company of Penguin Random House said in 2025 they used AI for marketing and to forecast demand.]
There've been a few high-profile controversies about prominent authors accused of using AI. But Princeton University Press CEO Christie Henry "is less concerned about authors secretly using AI to write than about the time spent policing the situation." "It pulls us away from having focused time to think," she says. Princeton University Press is currently vetting companies that promise to be able to certify that a given book was written by a human, including Created by Humans, Human Authored, and Verify My Writing. Henry adds that the proliferation of plagiarized, copycat, and pirated books online, now supercharged by AI agents mass producing and reproducing content, is further draining resources, as it demands constant vigilance and takedown requests sent to Amazon, YouTube, and others.
Of even more significance is the growing number of licensing deals publishers are striking with AI companies. In 2024, HarperCollins became the first of the Big Five to publicly reveal that it had signed a deal to license its content for AI training. The three-year agreement paid $5,000 per participating title, split equally between HarperCollins and the authors. Wiley announced its first AI licensing deal in 2024 and has since made several more. For fiscal year 2026, it reported earning $49 million in revenue from the deals. The company also has a number of strategic collaborations with companies including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, IQVIA, OpenEvidence, and others.
And publishers are even building in-house AI tools for producing royalty statements, proofreading, and providing customer service: In its 2025 Salary and Jobs Report, Publisher's Weekly reported that 63% of industry professionals surveyed said their organizations were using AI... Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group and CEO of Perfect Bound, has been a vocal advocate for the use of AI in publishing — despite calling himself a "hardcore techno-pessimist." He tells PW, "I do this because you use AI or you die at this point...." Like many in the industry, he maintains any use of AI must "start with a human and end with a human," and he draws a clear line, avoiding AI for core creative work, such as selecting titles, designing covers, or creating illustrations — reserving it for developmental editing, formatting, and admin instead... What is known is that each of the Big Five is developing proprietary AI systems for internal use, as proven by the numerous AI-related job openings the companies have posted... [And the parent company of Penguin Random House said in 2025 they used AI for marketing and to forecast demand.]
There've been a few high-profile controversies about prominent authors accused of using AI. But Princeton University Press CEO Christie Henry "is less concerned about authors secretly using AI to write than about the time spent policing the situation." "It pulls us away from having focused time to think," she says. Princeton University Press is currently vetting companies that promise to be able to certify that a given book was written by a human, including Created by Humans, Human Authored, and Verify My Writing. Henry adds that the proliferation of plagiarized, copycat, and pirated books online, now supercharged by AI agents mass producing and reproducing content, is further draining resources, as it demands constant vigilance and takedown requests sent to Amazon, YouTube, and others.
This is a multi-layered fight (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishers are looking for revenue. Distribution sources, electronic, print, and secondary markets look for their revenue.
Copyright holders, who may not be any of the above (See Author's Guild for litigation models) are another source of "injured parties".
There then becomes the motivation of content creators, authors, writers, researchers, and others who look at their work output becoming sucked in without compensation-- and this might be the biggest part of the problem.
If creators and researchers/etc stop generating source material, the entire food chain stops, and the quality of output to the ultimate consumer, us, becomes mightily stanched, a foot on the garden hose of knowledge.
Re:This is a multi-layered fight (Score:5, Insightful)
The word "book" isn't in there.
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If readers don't want to read the gibberish - and they won't - none of what you said even matters.
why should I read it (Score:3)
If you didn't want to write it
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Nothing wrong about using an AI as the editor. It is pretty good at that job.
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Meh. I think it generally gives bad advice, making the writing worse.
Re:why should I read it (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing wrong about using an AI as the editor. It is pretty good at that job.
That's debatable.
Part of why I read is plot/story/character, which generally survives any edit process. The other part of why I read is creative word-choices and sentence structures. Authors like Douglas Adams made deliberately convoluted structures that amused. The style of an author is - to me - an important thing.
Can LLM editors today accept and accommodate the voice of an author? No.
Will they ever? Almost definitely.
Where I'm at is that these tools need to be better-than-human before they should be deployed on creative material. This isn't just spell-checking, it's editing, which does involve understanding of the material and what an author is doing and why, and accepting that the results don't always fit the norms and shouldn't. Creative material is about pushing boundaries into new frontiers, and while LLM will probably get there, it's not there today and I don't want it blending my favorite authors' into some beige hellscape.
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They actually can - if you tell them, and sometimes they do that out of their own "initiative". LLMs are pretty good at pattern matching.
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They actually can - if you tell them, and sometimes they do that out of their own "initiative". LLMs are pretty good at pattern matching.
The problem is they're not currently good at not pattern-matching.
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And it is fine that way. They are not supposed to be creative, that is not the job of the editor, that is the job of the writer. Their job is to find mistakes - grammatical, orthographic, plot holes, that kind of stuff.
I have been slowly working on a novel for the past two years and ChatGPT turned out to be a decent editor. Not all it criticised was correct because it did not always "get" the context, but a lot of things have been quite insightful.
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Hmm. I don't know about that. If an AI distilled all of Robert Jordan's or RA Salvator's or Brandon Sanderson's books I think AI could most certainly produce another short book that sounded like the individual author.
I'm fairly sure that if I fed AI all my Slashdot posts, it could learn my style and put out something close enough. I personally enjoy writing, so the idea of using AI to do the writing for me is fairly repulsive.
I haven't bothered to try and I still won't after this interaction, but it seems p
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Hmm. I don't know about that. If an AI distilled all of Robert Jordan's or RA Salvator's or Brandon Sanderson's books I think AI could most certainly produce another short book that sounded like the individual author
Well that's the failure right there: you cannot produce a short anything in Robert Jordan's style ;)
Digs at Jordan aside, I think an LLM could probably do a reasonable job at small scales: if you were to pluck out a random paragraph from the author vs the LLM it could do a reasonable job of apin
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Why should I read, what you wanted to write?
If the text is pleasant to read, it doesn't matter who wrote it using which tools and why. You read a book because you like the story, not because it took a lot of work, don't you?
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Yeah I know there are some people who like to boycott certain authors, who must not be named, but that's for not wanting to pay them as they do not like them personally, not because the content is worse.
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Re:why should I read it (Score:4, Insightful)
and probably copyrighted it. Composed it. Maybe edited it. Laid it out on page. Perhaps illustrated it. Did the work.
Needs to get paid.
It's like Harlan Ellison said: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
NOT sucked up into an engine.
NOT guided by an "editor" with dubious values.
NOT enhanced by some well-intentioned silicon spew.
Real people. Real work. Getting paid.
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And if you don't know how it came to live, reading it is Schrödinger's enjoyment? Being Great and sucking at the same time until you hear if it was AI?
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Just wait until someone let's the cat out of the bag that *latest best seller* turns out to the written mostly by AI. It will happen one day. Gonna be funny too.
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For less popular works this already happened with a lot of people being angry at not noticing before. Also currently a lot of indie games are review-bombed for mentioning that they used AI somewhere in the process, no matter how minor the use was. I think that will go away, in particular with increasing quality. You can already read now "I hate AI slop, but this slop is sooo cute!" when someone posts a great AI video clip. Yeah, the people think they hate it, but when they see some high quality work, they s
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No problem there are more than enough good ones to fill a lifetime.
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The author's voice counts for something. Or at least it used to.
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Yes and no. If the AI has a good voice for the story (let's assume common problems like slop phrases, uniform style, etc. are solved a bit more) than there is no difference between a human author's voice and an AI author's voice. Either you like it or not. And not liking it doesn't mean it is bad, but that it isn't your taste. I have authors I like and authors I dislike and know people who have different opinions on them.
In the end there are more details one can discuss, but the blanket "I do not read it wh
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If you didn't want to write it
Isn't the more salient question whether you want to read it?
Which? (Score:1)
No doubt some are. If people will buy it, they want to sell it. I'm sure a few care about their reputation, but most people don't bother to educate themselves about such things.
Will there be books in the future? (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Will there be books in the future? (Score:5, Interesting)
That would be a disaster because then anything the AIs or the people controlling them want us to forget, would indeed be forgotten.
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What if a global entity could retain all the wit, mannerisms, and the most beautiful prose and descriptions, and tell the story the way the author would
What if I could wave a wand and a book would magically appear before me, perfect in every way? They're about equally likely.
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That's an interesting thought, but think about the implications.
Let's say you summarize the lord of the rings in two pages of bullet points. Sure, a LLM (not trained on the work) could rewrite a similar story. The overall hero's journey isn't a novel concept. But you still would get "LLM default style" + "two pages of facts". Everything that is not included in these two parts is lost. Did the author value small details other authors would describe in other ways? Do they use certain phrases? Can you summariz
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Now is that a problem? In the right context, no. It's fantastically awesome in minimizing my workload as a DM for my DnD game, because every DnD story is contrived and full of cliche's, that's what makes it fun.
But for books or real stories? Not really. Let's use some fantasy and sci-fi as an example, and a lot of what I'm about to say is crib
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In the future, some books may be primarily accessible only through AI. Having no available physical copies nor a legal electronic format.
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Then it is the stories, either loosely, or tightly constrained to include certain turns of phrase, certain descriptions of characters, etc..., that we begin trading and sharing, and not specific finished character-by-character snapshots at points in time
We already have this, it's called "fan fiction."
In any case, there's something like 4 million new books released *every year.* We really don't need AI to be able to add more output more quickly - if you have a weird niche book interest, I'm confident you can find hundreds of books that fill that niche that are released every year by actual people.
The appeal of AI to the publishers is that they don't have to pay anyone but themselves. Which has been their dream for decades.
Publishers are bastards.
The authors taking the reach around (Score:2)
Since the courts fucked them any way, they took the reach around.
Neither to your benefit nor to the author's (Score:3)
The publishers are in a position where they are threatened by the ebook market anyway and self-publishing already got easier. They would certainly love to publish without having to care for authors. While they cannot really gate-keep (AI or not), they can try to build a business competing with authors while not being threatened by authors publishing with other publishers or on their own anymore.
That's certainly bad for the authors, but I also I also suppose it doesn't mean much good to you. Even when the AI books will be able to compete with "real" works, the publisher's interest is not to provide you a book for the best price, but to keep up their business as profitable as possible. They rather become another play who wants to restrict the personal use of LLM (why would YOU want to generate your own novel?!) while benefiting from it themselves.
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One man's "gate-keeping" was everyone else's curating. The old model printing and distribution was a very real cost, usually two large to be borne by an author and certainly by a new author. The primary sales channels also had a premium on space, you can only put some many books on shelves low enough for customers to browse, their are only so many end aisles privilege products with placement showing more than their spine, and the story with magazine racks wasn't much different.
So the publishes provided eno
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I think you see the "curating and distributing" thing good with scientific journals. They charge money while the authors and editors work for free. Why does anyone participate in this predatory model? Back in the days people got their new scientific articles by subscribing to a real paper journal and the journal did real work for science communication.
Today everyone can upload a PDF and a good community could curate what's crap and what's insightful. Scientific journals are only not dying out of tradition.
I'd like a tool that (Score:2)
When reading Tacitus, I'd like a tool that helps decipher Roman naming conventions that continuously evolved in the early AD years. Actually I think that tool should just say "don't approach Tacitus until you have a full understanding of Roman nomenclature and its evolutions. Might as well understand the Julio-Claudian dynasty while you're at it, so you don't get confused as to who Tacitus is talking about at any given time."
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When reading Tacitus, I'd like a tool that helps decipher Roman naming conventions that continuously evolved in the early AD years.
That's called a "translator". Unless you're reading it in the original Latin, that's what a good translator will do in footnotes. It even exits in English. Take "The life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman". Written in 1760, so modern English and so perfectly readable... in theory.
Except it's basically wall to wall slang, memes and pop culture references in a kind of po
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The translator is using nouns directly as they are written in the original Latin. If Tacitus calls Germanicus "Caesar" while he's cutting Arminius' army to bits, he's not talking about the current emperor, he's referring to Germanicus the general. I think it's just a text that requires getting used to the naming conventions of the time.
Read the license before calling it hypocrisy (Score:4, Interesting)
Suing over allegedly unauthorized copying while selling licenses is a coherent position. Permission has a scope. Buying an ebook, asking software questions about it, and using it to train a general-purpose model are different uses. Lumping them together as "embracing AI" obscures most of the interesting questions.
The money figures check out. The Authors Guild confirms [authorsguild.org] HarperCollins' $5,000-per-title arrangement, split equally with participating authors. Crucially, it was opt-in, and the author's payment did not count against their advance. The Guild also criticized the publisher's 50% share. Wiley confirms $49 million in fiscal 2026 AI revenue [q4cdn.com]. That establishes a market; whether authors are getting a good deal requires looking at the contracts.
Google's announcement [blog.google] confirms the named publishers and more than 100,000 eligible books, with readers required to own the relevant title through Google Play Books. It describes interacting with books in Gemini Notebook. You cannot infer blanket permission for model training from that announcement.
A couple of numbers deserve their original qualifiers. PW reports approximately 15 other author-led lawsuits and roughly 10 publisher suits [publishersweekly.com]; those remain the publication's estimates, rather than an independently reproduced case count. The 63% figure comes from survey respondents reporting their employers' AI use [publishersweekly.com]. It does not measure how much publishing work AI performs.
The certification paragraph needs the most care. Human Authored explicitly uses identity verification and contractual self-certification [authorsguild.org]. It does not scan a manuscript and prove that a human wrote it. Meanwhile, Created by Humans describes itself as an AI rights licensing platform [createdbyhumans.ai]. Listing these services together should not imply that reliable authorship detection is a solved problem.
I'm also unconvinced that developmental editing belongs in the same administrative bucket as formatting invoices. Decisions about structure, pacing, and character are creative decisions. And "start with a human and end with a human" needs an actual operating budget: give that human enough time and authority to reject the output. Otherwise, you've mainly ensured that somebody is available to take the blame.
Reading isn't what it used to be (Score:2)
... enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows ...
This development may profoundly alter what I might call "the ratio of interiority to exteriority". Put simply, traditional reading is primarily a solitary activity which takes place mostly inside the head of the reader. There's a flow involved, along with a unique set of emotions, thoughts, realizations, and assumptions.
It seems to me that this new style of reading, if it becomes widespread, will cause an across-the-board change in the way our brains are wired. That has already happened to some extent with
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Jesus christ, a quiz and a slide show? Are they trying to turn reading a book into a parody of a bad educational experience??
We writers, certainly are not warming up to AI. (Score:3)
AI are the new Cliff Notes? (Score:2)
George Orwell wrote of computers that wrote the mass-production books, filled with information and themes the government wanted in them to keep the Proles entertsained and subdued..