A.I. Books: The Death of the Author?
There's been a marked uptick in nervous chatter within the publishing world over A.I. books.Some say they'll upend the whole industry, while others once again predict the death of the author.
Hat tip to author JD Cowan for pointing me to this piece in The Bookseller about an upstart publisher called Spines.
A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.
Related: Larry Correia on the A.I. Enthusiasm Deficit
Spines recently secured $16m in series A funding and claims to have so far published 273 titles in September 2024, 33 of which were published on the same day. “We want to publish up to 8,000 books next year. The goal is to help a million authors publish their books,” Yehuda Niv, c.e.o and co-founder of Spines told The Bookseller.Niv said he realised “three years ago that the publishing industry was about to be disrupted by this emerging technology named AI”. At the time, he ran a hybrid publisher and publishing services business in Israel called Niv Books. “I realised I had two options: either to be made irrelevant by AI, or to lead this opportunity in the world,” he said.
Expanding their business from publishing about 100 books per quarter to 8,000 in a year would be quite a feat. For comparison, Big 5 juggernaut Simon and Schuster only publishes one-quarter as many titles annually.
So the question arises as to just how Spines plans to quadruple S&S's output with 1 percent of their labor force.But these sound like tech savvy young forward thinkers. Let's see what kinds of innovative solutions they've come up with.
Like Microsoft’s 8080 Books, Spines has a focus on speed. Niv claimed the platform can reduce the time it takes to publish a book from six to 18 months, to two to three weeks. He claimed authors are willing to pay “tens of thousands” on publishing services for self-published books, but Spines costs $1,200 to $5,000 to automate proofreading, cover design, metadata optimisation and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.
And the answer is they're charging authors four figures to run their manuscripts through Grammarly, generate a cover with Stable Diffusion, and pick keywords with Publisher Rocket.All to bring an already complete MS to market in the unprecedented span of ...... Three weeks.
As much as I hate to rain on Spines' parade, I could name several newpub authors who can get a book to market in three weeks starting without a finished MS.In fact, I've done it.Related: Pulp SpeedAnd since most of the people I've seen getting anxoious over this news are novelists, let me assure you–Spines' model is no threat to fiction authors.Longtime readers of this blog are familiar with Amazon fiction ghettos. What's flown under most novelists' radar is the clientele that glorified vanity presses like Spines target.You see, in the past decade little tech aspirants with disposable incomes became captivated by the Lean In phenomenon.Since the tech industry can no longer produce anything useful, what we have is a glut of software company founders stapling Calendly clones to PowerPoint knockoffs and claiming they invented the lightbulb.Now, selling investors on these reinvented wheels takes social proof-generating hype. So startup founders pay vanity presses in the hope that publishing their memoirs will raise their profile with venture capitalists. And it's those little tech founders who only care about books insofar as they can drum up capital that operations like Spines are courting.By the way, that's also why these new vanity presses are salting their ad copy with buzzwords like "A.I." and managerial cant such as "disrupting the industry" and "leading the opportunity."In other words, tech nerds selling A.I.-enhanced books to each other has created a new Amazon ghetto.Related: Amazon GhettosSo the takeaway is that if a vanity press' model depends on charging the inventor of the self-licking ice cream cone six figures to scrape and collate blog posts into a marketing prop, then yeah. Odds are they're one of those Niv warned will become irrelevant.If, on the other hand, you have a passion for writing fun stories meant to give readers a temporary escape from the lame cyberpunk dystopia Big Tech has created, you'll be fine.But will A.I. usher in the death of the author?Maybe in nonfiction, but human storytellers have little to worry about for now.
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