A response from our CEO to Easypress' 2025 retrospective blog.

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The Good, The Bad and The Ugly...

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2025 marks the 75^th anniversary of Alan Turing’s published paper in Mind^*, which laid the foundation for what we now refer to as Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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Every CEO in publishing should be concerned with improving the margins shown on the bottom line of their P&L, quarter by quarter. Here, AI – through the intelligent adoption of machine learning, large publishing data models, and predictive analytics – can transform editorial and production workflows into effective drivers of increased productivity, at a time when consistently improving business margins year on year is essential for promoting growth and expanding opportunity.

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I have been working in the technology space for over forty years, and have witnessed many tech revolutions. They come in waves, all with the potential to leave a lasting legacy, and over time the ability to transform our collective working and leisure worlds.

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In recent months, The Publishers Association reported that a class action had been brought by authors – in a landmark legal case in New York – to challenge OpenAI’s argument that it could not be held responsible for infringement of copyright. Authors have made numerous claims that OpenAI’s generative AI technology has been used to publish content they believe infringes their existing copyright.

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Authors and their publishers have been complaining that generative AI technology is increasingly being used to generate new bestsellers without the permission of the authors who originally published the books on which the AI-generated works are based.

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Indeed, sources claim that in Amazon’s “Teen & Young Adult Contemporary Romance eBooks” sub-category, as many as 81 out of 100 books on the bestseller list appeared to be AI-generated spam. It should be noted that Amazon, in response to this, now requires authors and sellers to confirm that their eBooks are not generated by AI.

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Clearly, that will solve the problem!

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From this, we can conclude that generative AI is having a harmful effect on authors, whose creative work is being hijacked by unscrupulous users of the technology for their own commercial gain.

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I suspect that once the legal precedents have been reset and copyright infringement is improved through more rigorous assessment, the problem will stabilise.

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Curiously, the surprising statistic for the observer is that if 81 out of 100 books are bestsellers produced using AI-assisted publishing, then there is clearly a market among readers for this semi-artificially generated content. I’m sure this point is not lost on the big publishers, and there is evidently an opportunity for some book genres – particularly in copyright-expired romantic and gothic literature, where the authors are long dead – where a reimagining of Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, or the Roger Brook series might be revitalised.

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Publishers holding these out-of-print backlists may want to rethink their assets and consider bringing them back into print for new generations of readers – with a modern twist.

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Just a thought for the future.

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There are many sides to the creation, use, and adoption of AI. Across nearly all industries, AI is being developed and implemented for productivity improvements, helping to increase the efficiency of many businesses, sectors, and industries.

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Here, the main adoption concerns are job losses and the deskilling of currently semi-manual tasks.

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Publishing has many tasks that fall into this category. In editorial, how many publishers still support large teams of well-educated, highly skilled staff to structure and lay out an authored manuscript, to produce a typeset file in Adobe InDesign, or to create an eBook?

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As a publishing observer for more than 20 years, it never fails to surprise me that publishers often go to extreme lengths to recruit, train, and support highly educated staff from top universities across the globe – only to have them sitting behind a screen using MS Word to correct manuscripts to a specific publishing style. This is arguably one of the least demanding tasks a manual or semi-manual staffer can perform inpublishing, especially when far smarter technological tools now exist to deliver the required consistency, at greater speed and lower cost, than relying on teams of highly qualified staff to achieve the same outcome.

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Smarter technology and AI have an important role to play in improving the productivity of book publishing in all its forms. However, many are pointing to aspects of AI (generative AI, to be precise) as merely a bubble that will eventually burst and disappear.

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I am one of those who believes that what we and the publishing industry are witnessing today is merely the first wave of future change. The challenge for publishing beyond 2025 is clear: the adoption of AI is imperative at several levels.

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To paraphrase Professor Philip Kotler, who originally wrote about corporate change:

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There are three kinds of publishers: those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened.

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The future impact of AI on the publishing industry as a whole will, I believe, be as profound as Professor Philip Kotler states.

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Individual publishers who fail to acknowledge this, do so at their own peril.

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Good luck!

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JMM

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^{* Turing, A.M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind, 59, 433–460}

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Easypress is a publishing production software and services company based in the UK, delivering award-winning technology globally for over 20 years. ‍

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‍If you would like to learn more about the production services and publishing software Easypress provides for clients, please contact us.  

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Alternatively, you can schedule an online meeting for a time to suit you via our Calendly page.

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