In today’s book news, John Grisham rails against AI slop audiobooks, painted book covers make a comeback, lawsuits reveal the messiness of copyright, and more.
John Grisham Would Prefer if You Didn’t Listen to AI Slop Versions of his Audiobooks
If you want to listen to John Grisham’s audiobooks, you have a few options. You could buy the official audiobook with a professional human narrator or borrow it from the library. Alternatively, you could listen to an AI voice drone through it on YouTube, accompanied by unsettling AI-generated visuals. Unsurprisingly, John Grisham would prefer if you didn’t choose the latter option.
The YouTube video, which violates copyright, has been up for six months and has accumulated almost 100,000 views. Music (and TV and movie) publishers use Content ID to automatically detect copyrighted work—but that strategy doesn’t work for AI audiobooks, because it’s searching for identical audio, not text.
YouTube has responded by saying no one has issued a takedown notice for the video. I expect publishers will have to develop strategies to deal with this, because having a free version of the audiobook easily available—even a subpar version—will certainly affect sales. If the only option is manually searching for these AI slop audiobooks and individually issuing takedown notices, though, I’m not sure that the math works out, especially when another one could pop up in its place overnight.
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Move Over Blob Books, Painted Book Covers are Back in Style
The last trend of literary fiction covers was blobs: colorful, abstract designs that were still recognizable when viewed as an inch-high image on a phone screen. Now, it’s been replaced by the resurgence of painted book covers, which use oil or acrylic paintings. The Hyperallergic article by Tara Anne Dalbow has plenty of examples of the different approaches to this style, and Dalbow points out the likely inspiration behind it: “In a market flooded with design templates and AI-generated imagery, the painted cover stands out as distinctly human.”
AI Lawsuits are Revealing the Messiness of Copyright
The recent 1.5 billion dollar Anthropic settlement is one of the biggest developments in AI and publishing. As Writer Beware points out, though, it’s also revealing some of the messiness around copyright. The payout from the Anthropic lawsuit only went out to authors with books that have ISBNs, cutting out most self-published and many indie-published titles. A further limitation is that even many traditionally published authors have found out the hard way that their publishers did not register their books for copyright, even though it was part of their contract. This makes them ineligible for the settlement. The fallout from this lawsuit has shown that the reality of copyright is much messier than it may first appear.
Grab Your Towel and Don’t Panic
Grab your towel, pour yourself a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and whatever you do: Don’t Panic. This week on the Zero to Well-Read Podcast, Jeff and Rebecca journey to the weirdest and most whimsical corners of the galaxy with Douglas Adams’s genre-defining work of comedic science fiction. They talk about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘s surprising origins and wide-ranging influence, what made Adams one of the funniest writers to ever do it, and why the book’s overt silliness belies its stealthy insights into human nature. Of course, they also explore the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything.
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