AI Assistants Move Into Editorial Workflows
The most consequential AI deployment in publishing this year is not a chatbot answering reader queries or an algorithmic marketing tool optimising social spend.…
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Metadata Automation Cuts Title Onboarding Time in Half
Ask anyone who has launched a book what the true bottleneck was, and they will rarely mention printing. They will mention metadata: the forty,…
EPUB4 Draft Spec Sparks Debate Across the Supply Chain
A technical document few readers will ever see is generating an unusual volume of argument across the book trade. The draft specification for EPUB4…
On-Demand Printing Integrates Directly With Publisher ERPs
The book trade’s on-demand printing revolution has always had an awkward final step. For twenty years, digital printing allowed a publisher to manufacture single…
AI Drafting Assistants Move Into the Author's Study — and Split the Room
The most consequential AI tool in publishing is not in the publisher’s office at all. It is in the author’s study, where drafting assistants…
The Algorithmic Bookshelf: AI Recommendation Reshapes What Gets Discovered
Every era of publishing has had its gatekeeper — the bookseller’s shelf, the reviewer’s column, the book-club list — and every gatekeeper has made…
Publishers Open a New Market: Licensing Books as AI Training Data
After three years of watching their books absorbed into AI systems without permission or payment, publishers have stopped waiting for the law to catch…
Voice Cloning Arrives in Audiobook Production, and Narrators Set the Terms
The voice is the audiobook industry, and for the first time in its history, the voice can be manufactured. Voice cloning — the AI…
Reading Analytics Reshape Acquisition Decisions
The slush pile has acquired a data layer. Across trade publishing, the acquisition meeting — that stubbornly human institution of taste, advocacy and hunch…
Voice-First Audio Platforms Test Dynamic Narration
The audiobook has always been a recording: fixed, finished, identical for every listener. A new generation of voice-first platforms is testing whether it has…
Cybersecurity Becomes a Board-Level Issue for Publishers
The publishing house’s nightmare used to be a pulped print run. Its nightmare now arrives by email, encrypts the manuscript archive, and copies itself…
Zero-Party Data Strategies Replace Third-Party Tracking
The collapse of third-party tracking has done what a decade of privacy advocacy could not: forced publishers to ask their readers directly. Zero-party data…