‘8,000 books next year’: Gen AI bros are digging their greedy claws further into the publishing industry

The Bookseller, the U.K.’s leading publishing industry trade publication, recently reported an exclusive feature about a relatively new “publisher” called Spines. Publisher isn’t really the right word for it, though.

Spines might be more accurately described as one of those “disruptive” tech startups Gen AI bros love so much, a vanity publisher on steroids. Spines, or “Spine-less,” as one aggrieved X (formerly Twitter) user called it, is planning on publishing “8,000 books next year” by getting presumably desperate authors and those looking to make a quick buck to pay them up to $5,000 to have their work published. This fee includes automated AI-powered services like “proofreading, cover design, metadata optimization, and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.”

In other words, while these books will reportedly be the author’s original creation—how will we ever know for sure, though?—everything else will have been handled by a computer, sucking the humanity out of the publishing process and putting thousands of jobs at risk. Authors may (understandably) be lured in by the promise of retaining all their royalties, but given how bloated the publishing world’s offerings already are, there’s no guarantee they’ll ever actually earn back their $5,000 investment.

When The Bookseller asked Spines if they’d produced any true bestsellers this year and what their sales volume was like, the company responded: “That data is private and belongs to the author.” It sent over a list of seven books that have supposedly done well enough to be labeled as successes. But when The Bookseller searched for those Spines titles available for sale on Amazon, it found just six, with most having accrued anywhere between 7-22 ratings and just one having earned over 70 reader ratings. If you’re familiar with Amazon’s bookshop, you’ll know that real bestsellers often have hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of user reviews. How much money are these authors actually making?

Spines won’t stop at simple publishing, though—no, it also wants to disrupt the audiobook side of the publishing industry by releasing audiobooks produced with synthetic AI-generated voices. It plans on creating a program with which an author’s voice can be cloned to fast-track audiobooks. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anything worse than listening to an audiobook narrated by a robot, no matter whose voice it’s trying to emulate. What about emotion, empathy, emphasis, and humor?

The Bookseller’s original article caused a justifiable wave of outrage on social media. Some questioned how Spines plans on providing their books with any chance of finding readers in an already overwhelmed market, others lamented the use of Generative AI in storytelling, and others simply said “No one asked for this.” I’m inclined to agree with them.

Spines may not be the first “publisher” to want to utilize AI (though perhaps it is the first to use it to such a gross extent), but there’s something incredibly disturbing about how this start-up views the publishing process. For Spines, it’s all about speed, as it claims it can reduce the publishing process from “six to 18 months, to two to three weeks.”

Is the publishing industry slow? Yes. I’m not going to lie and say it’s perfect, either. Authors are often paid a pittance, editors are severely overworked, payments go out late, children’s publishing is overwhelmed by ghostwritten celebrity books, and we’re still far from having truly fair and equal representation. But what Spines is doing is forsaking all sense of teamwork, camaraderie, and creativity that make a published book what it is. Publishing might be an industry, but it is also an art form. It combines every known type of art to create something unique and transformative.

Designing a cover is a skill; each artistic detail is there for a reason. Translating isn’t about throwing something into Google Translate and hoping for the best, it’s about interpreting and embracing another language and giving others a chance to discover new stories they may never have heard of otherwise (if you’re interested in knowing more about the difficulties of translation as a profession, may I suggest R.F. Kuang’s Babel?). Narrating audiobooks is acting, perhaps even more difficult, as all one has to convey the story is a voice. The editing process is a collaboration between editor and writer, a chance to make the book the best it can be. There’s a reason it takes a few months to publish a novel or a work of non-fiction.

No, not all traditionally published or self-published books out in the world are masterpieces. Far from it. But at the very least, we can rest assured that most of them were created by humans. What will happen in a few years as more companies like Spines try to take over? Storytelling is a part of our DNA. I don’t want AI anywhere near it.