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Title: Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry?

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/09/21/0551...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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