The Northmen used to disrupt monastic scholars with axes and fire, but nowadays they plan to use AI. I think the publishing industry might cry out for a return to more brutal forms of barbarity after seeing this team of bearded bros climbing out of their longships.
New publisher Spines aims to ‘disrupt’ industry by using AI to publish 8,000 books in 2025 alone
Once upon a time, ‘disruption’ was not a desirable result…although I guess you could call what a slaughterhouse does to a cow “disruption.” It doesn’t help that the description makes it look like yet another grift.
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.
Respectable publishing houses pay the author for the right to sell their books, not vice versa. If it’s a good book, and if the publisher does their job of promoting and distributing the book, there’s no reason to bill the author. If, on the other hand, your company is just churning out books through a print-on-demand service and is going to do nothing but skim off the profits, they might well decide that there are enough gullible wanna-be authors out there that they can gouge out $5000 before letting the product wither.
You know what they say: great minds dress alike!
AI can write texts (and I’m grateful for the possibility to communicate with my pupils’ parents thanks to it), but only humans can write stories. Though, many humans tend to write the same stories, so I guess those would be indistiguishable from AI
Books about what?
This is so far beyond me that I had trouble understanding what they are doing. Thanks for clearing that up, PZ.
Also, ‘using AI’ has become quite the buzzword.
It’s not obvious that these are northmen?
Self-publishing sites have been around a long time. My mother used lulu.com to publish her fictionalized memoir about her own mother, and that was two decades ago. They only charged a few dollars per copy, and I see it’s still on sale at their website. Charging $5000 up front is ridiculous.
That photo is AI generated. You can tell because only one of them has a manbun.
This used to be called “Vanity Publishing.” Usually for writers who can’t admit their writing is bad and no reputable publisher would buy it.
Vanity presses have been around for over a century. They suck lots of money out of foolish people who think people will read their words. However, 99%+ of these books are a waste of paper. These clowns have just found a way to streamline the process.
As a publisher of artistic works, we purchased a block of 100 ISBNs from Bowker. But, we could not publicly present our works because two evil behemoths were stealing and digitizing copyright works by the tens of thousands. Coalitions of authors and legitimate publishers spent vast amounts of time and money but those two founts of greed buried the legal system in money so they could continue their plunder of other peoples creative works.
This is all consistent with the shallowness, ignorance and monied corruption of our failed society.
To those who still have any intellectual ability to perceive : WTTNDA (yes, Welcome To the New Dark Ages)
Disruption, eh?
I guess it’s vanity publishing for those who are to lazy or inept to write and can’t afford a ghost writer?
@#9
https://youtu.be/VEA3TEl4XVI?si=fcfR8nmIQKw_w-D0
I’ve never looked at a long AI work. Are they still having trouble with object permanence?
Rich Woods, with their 🙄 models, though, they can make such stacks all the faster! And certainly vanity is in no short supply.
It’s not streamlining the process if you’re adding an AI step. Just take their money and print it as is.
@PZ Myers:
And how do we know they aren’t actually planning on doing that? I mean, most of the big vanity publishers like PublishAmerica said they were getting people to read and edit the books when they clearly weren’t. They could just be saying they’re using AI as a buzzword to attract attention from the sorts of people who would fall for that, and then do nothing more ‘intelligent’ than run it through spellcheck, if that.
(If you want to see people having fun with this, look up the history of Atlanta Nights, a book written to prove that a particular vanity press wasn’t even reading the book: each chapter was written by a different person with minimal communication between them, making it something like a novel version of the artistic ‘exquisite corpse’.)
[depredations]
Already been done: scammy AI-generated book rewrites are flooding Amazon.
Nothing says “slithered through 4 years of college on Cliff Notes” like that photo. Really, it should be in the dictionary next to the definition of ‘semiliterate’.
@larpar #7 – I thought they were quadruplets.
They suck lots of money out of foolish people who think people will read their words.
Maybe they can find a way to suck lots of money out of foolish AIs that think people will read their words…?
Just a hat tip to PZ for the ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ nod in the title of this post
Vanity publishing by itself is fine and can be an avenue to publication for writers who are not seeking mass market sales, e.g. family histories, reflections on a narrow interest, wanting to distribute the work for free, Chuck-Tinglesque niche fetishists, or simply because someone wants their family photo album as a printed volume. Most of these are now published online, and if an author wants hard copies, they will usually only be interested in print runs of <100 (and for photo albums, often only one copy).
The problem is that a few vanity presses got into the business of scamming naive authors, promising paths to bestseller lists that were never really there. And when the sales fail to materialise, they blame the author for not doing enough to market their book. (A variation of “you didn’t pray hard enough.”)
This new venture is just the AI-infused version of that scam. I find it very hard to believe it will succeed since, as rsmith points out, trashy AI books are flooding Amazon already and for a lot less than $5k up front. I also fail to see why anyone would pay a large sum for AI services that you can run for yourself with equally poor results from home.
shermanj@9 describes a related problem in the publishing industry: the ripping off of other people’s work. This, too, has been flourishing on Amazon. While it’s not strictly speaking vanity publishing unless the thief puts their own name/pseudonym on it, it has been aggressively exploited by the more unethical vanity presses because it’s a natural synergy, like loan sharking and money laundering.
[heh]
https://slate.com/culture/2024/11/amazon-side-hustle-books-literature.html
That image looked disturbingly AI-generated to me, so in the spirit of the occasion I put the photo into ChatGPT for a reverse image prompt. This is what it offered:
Plugging that back into ChatGPT to generate an image, I got a remarkably similar picture (although without manbuns), which just goes to show that nobody needs these doofuses to distribute creatively bereft content.
Henry David Thoreau wrote about his experience with self-publishing:
How exactly is yet another vanity publisher going to disrupt anything?
The (further) enshitification of the thing called ‘book’
OK. Just from the blurb the implication is not that the AI is going to “write the book”, its just going to proof read it, probably make a bunch of utterly stupid suggestions, etc. It needs to cost insane amounts, sadly, because AI costs insane amounts to run, seeing as it needs a massive server, especially for a huge number of users, and enough electricity to run 2-3 small cities. As for it being a scam.. eh… I would rather, as much as I hate the idea, publish via Amazon, if I had something.
As for stealing other people’s work – this has always been happening. Like almost everything, including books, reworking old stories from someone else’s work is not always bad, though more than half will be. There is a fun little series known as Pride and Nakedness that is basically a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, but a fair bit shorter, for example. It is based around a rich guy, who meets a girl who is a naturist, lets his best friend con him into thinking she is out for his money, then later being told off by his sister for being a complete ass, and having to run to try to find where she lives to see if she will forgive him, basically. The spin, other than nudism/naturism is the discovery that some guy found a rare set of conjunctions, which opens a portal between worlds, in which the alternate world she comes from is one in which the “weird creeps you can’t trust”, are not the ones hanging around naked, and you get even more absurd things like – superman hiding his identity with literally only a pair of glasses in the comics, and the president giving a national address while naked, etc., because all that is normal. No, the scary people are the ones who put on a trench coat, or some other clothing, so they can hide their perversions. Its a fun and interesting twist to the story. And, frankly, “everyone” steals ideas from both past fiction. The issue is, “Do they just change some names, and plagiarize the entire rest of the story, with no changes, or do they do something unique with it? And if they come close to copying it wholesale, do they bother attributing it at all to the original?”
But, as to this absurd thing.. It sounds like some tech-bro types, with no comprehension of how the publishing industry works at all, no clue what options exist out there, and an unhealthy obsession with the magical abilities of LLMs, who think they have come up with an amazing solution to a non-existent problem – aka, pretty much what you have to expect when ever you get a new technology, which every idiot in site is suddenly amazed and excited about, including some major corporations, but less than 1% of the people involved in it actually understand what it can actually do, or has a clue what it is actually going to be useful for (i.e., the internet during the 1980s, when every moron on the planet had a website, and less than 10 years later 98% of those sites where gone, including the ones created by clueless companies that thought they needed a “web presence”, but had no f-ing clue what that meant, or how to create one, or what to do with it, even if they did.)
Actually, going to go a bit further – traditional publishers are a nightmare, even authors say so. There is a reason that the shelf containing the “top books” at any store that has one has almost universally 1) the same authors, all the time, even if their newest book is garbage, and 2) its almost always the same genre, style, and content. The “big publishers” suffer from something liken to the issue with TV and movie execs – they don’t actually comprehend why people like the books, or even what is in them, in many cases, they only see what sold, and want more of that. This is literally why everything on TV is always the same, and why movie studies latch onto a new trend, then run it into the ground, before they realize its not working any more – but, they often only recognize that it isn’t, not what went wrong, or what is needed to fix it – their “fix” is always, “More of the stuff we did that we think worked!”, when sometimes the problem is they have done so much more of it that they lost the plot (both literally and figuratively). Book stores where great, up to a point, because you had many publishers, and if you got fed up reading Steven King, and 2-3 other authors that the publishers decided where similar enough to push as “must reads”, you could find something else, but.. you also could read book one in a series, which you liked, and was well written, but which the publisher decided didn’t make enough money, and there would never be a book 2. E-books solved this to a massive degree, in as much as the ebook company could itself publish, and if you want to find something new a) you just need to put in some search terms, b) it had a huge number of publishers, more than a book store, and c) there is no reason to “not” publish book 2, even if its a meh book, but especially if its a good one, but some clown decided is was “in the way” of a new Steven King novel on the shelf, or didn’t make enough money. Now, there are still problems, and a fair number of authors, as a result, publish via multiple companies, and have their own website, where, if all else fails, they could, once they have a fan base, just bundle their book into an epub, or something similar, and sell it direct to the customer. Its just “getting the fan base” that you need to publishers for – that and.. as long as they keep your book in their published list, people can buy print copies, and more easily find your works.
But, yeah, there have been serious issues with “traditional publishers”, its just.. these clowns are 10+ years too late to the table, and their “solution” is stupid, even if it had been possible 10+ years ago. lol
Publishing? I do things the Vogon way, i. e. I chain my enemies and force them to listen to my poems.
So their target revenue is $40,000,000 (if they don’t sell any books). Not enough for them to become super rich. Shocking lack of ambition.
John @17: Indeed. Cognate with ‘predation’.
bravus @22: It’s not a hat-tip to the Miller novel. The first sentence of the post makes it clear it’s a hat-tip to the prayer A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine: “From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord”, supposedly used during Viking raids on Britain.
See also A sagittis Hungarorum libera nos, Domine: “From the arrows of the Hungarians deliver us, O Lord”, from the time Magyars were running rampant in 10th century Europe.
Miller was just using an established formula.
I wouldn’t be surprised if one or more of the established publishing houses was bankrolling this, in an effort to discredit independent publishers.
I would be more surprised if they really managed to churn out 800, let alone 8000 volumes of AI-assisted crap before anyone noticed how bad everything actually was that they were selling (which probably isn’t going to be hard, if the books get trustworthy reviews). By which time the damage will be well and truly done, and nobody is going to trust any independent publisher again for a long while. And once the competition is out of the way, book prices are sure to begin creeping up, although authors’ cheques might not seem to be getting any bigger, or more frequent, to show for it …..
The real tragedy is the genuine authors with something interesting to say who are likely to wind up suffering as a consequence of an unlucky decision.