Category: UK
UK’s Society of Authors Shows Itself To Be Unfit For Purpose
The real risk is of UK authors being drowned out by the generic and derivative outputs of the Society of Authors, which is constantly behind the times when it comes to publishing.
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The $1.275 billion UK audiobook market
By recognising and embracing the full potential of AI across the industry, publishers, authors and narrators alike can surf this new wave of possibilities, instead of being left behind.
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The UK’s Kids’ Reading Crisis Redux. Don’t Blame the Parents
But these kids are attending school every day, where the joy of reading is being leached from their very souls by a broken system of teaching children to read.
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Redundancies in UK Publishing: A Misleading Snapshot of 2024
Why is there so little analysis out there of what the Trump years may bring for our industry? Love him or loathe him, no-one is ever going to accuse Trump of being a booklover and a friend of the publishing industry.
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Bookouture Clocks ‘Significant Double-Digit Sales Growth’ Two Years Running
Bookouture’s commitment to growth and adapting to market trends, vindicates my early impressions of Bookouture back before the 2017 buyout by Hachette UK, as a publisher to watch.
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Children reading for pleasure at an all-time low. Industry in panic mode. The problem lies in the classroom, not the industry
Does anyone seriously expect a child to enjoy reading if they cannot read properly?
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Pearson credits AI with driving sales
Pearson is at the forefront of a fundamental shift in educational publishing that in time is going to bring into question the very viability of printed books in the education sector.
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OUP terminates US jobs, but no, AI was not to blame, so no-one will be shedding tears. Business is business!
AI not to blame? Hence the deafening silence from the industry sidelines.
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UK – Penguin book-vending machines: a gimmick and a missed opportunity
Do you have any idea how many secondary schools there are in the UK? How about 4,190, per BESA. So Penguin, two down, 4,188 to go! So far you are averaging two a year, so you could have a book-vending machine in every secondary school in the country by 2064!
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UK’s Society of Authors asks AI companies to tell them which books were used to train LLMs because the SoA hasn’t got any evidence
The SoA believes they have such a strong legal case that they have, after several months choosing the right words, written to the tech companies with a seven day ultimatum (one hundred and eleven days to write the letter, seven days to comply – hey, that’s fair!) to acknowledge receipt.
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No, the Creatives’ Rights Alliance does not speak for 500,000 people. Nicola Solomon needs to heed her own demands about consultation
And one has to wonder how it is that all these organisations have joined the Creatives’ Rights Alliance at the same time. Should we be reporting that to the competition authorities?
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Centre Pompidou’s Embrace of Comics: A New Era for the 9th Art
British girls’ comics held a special fascination for me, and while the storylines all too often reflected twentieth century British class divisions, the art in many girls comics, and especially those from the DC Thomson camp, was a joy to behold.
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