Velocity of Content Podcast

05/14/2024

10/12/2023

On Thursday, October 12, 2023, CCC presented a Town Hall special program on voluntary collective licensing, its significance to research in many fields, and the role it can play to drive innovation in science and technology, including AI.

During the program, CCC’s General Counsel Catherine Zaller Rowland and a panel of international legal experts including Prof. Daniel Gervais, Bruce Rich, and Carlo Scollo Lavizarri discussed how voluntary collective licensing is a proven way to use large collections of copyrighted materials with permission, and why AI technologies must address important concerns over equity, transparency, and authenticity.

In the rapidly developing world of AI uses and discussions, copyright issues are key. From Large Language Models (LLMs) to other research-based applications,...

10/01/2023

Nadim Sadek entwines the histories of AI and book publishing to make his case that AI technologies can complement, and not necessarily replace, human authors, editors, and publishers.

Complete interview https://velocityofcontentpodcast.com/how-publishing-can-shimmr-with-ai/

09/18/2023

“We need to work on AI literacy in education,” says Prof. Mairéad Pratschke, the University of Manchester.

Prof. Pratschke tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, “Recognize it at the campus level by creating those policies that people are talking about now, issuing guidance to students and to staff.

"It’s critical that they know how to use it, when to use it, if they can use it, in what assignments they can use it, and what the guidelines state specifically.”

Listen to complete interview on CCC's YouTube channel https://youtu.be/oHpmFDLh06E?si=X3zDdxmDAZaUHikL

08/28/2023

Jane Friedman, an author who writes on writing, has a very good name in the book business. For 25 years, Jane Friedman has put her name to books and blogs about the publishing industry, including The Hot Sheet, a biweekly newsletter for authors.

Bogus books that trick readers into buying a work because they unsuspectingly recognize a familiar title or an author’s name have long polluted Amazon and e-commerce bookselling sites. It’s an issue Jane Friedman has followed and deplored. But when a Friedman fan emailed her about her new book, she quickly learned that her own good name was attached to a new kind of bad books.

The books on sale on Amazon offer the keys to a successful writing career, with titles like A Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting Compelling eBooks and Strategies to Skyrocket Your Book Sales on Amazon.

But Jane Friedman didn’t write any of them. In fact, she doesn’t think anyone wrote these books, but that they were manufactured by machines.

“It was easy to see that this was coming. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe two or three years ago, there was a colleague of mine, Jason Boog, who was experimenting with some of these models. It was probably like a baby version of ChatGPT that he was working with,” Friedman tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“I remember Jason talking about it to a group of writers, and I thought, ‘wow.’ If what he was describing gets more advanced, which it will, and then becomes public and free, which I anticipated, we’re going to have an avalanche of material enter the market, and probably a lot of fraudulent work as well.”

“Good name in man and woman,” wrote Shakespeare, “is the immediate jewel of their souls.”

08/13/2023

Journalism professor and book author Jeff Jarvis recalls that early in his own writing and publishing career, he wrote on typewriters and saw his story set in hot metal linotype.

With titles like "What Would Google Do?" and "Geeks Bearing Gifts," though, the books Jarvis writes today make obvious how much has changed since those days.

Indeed, in his new book, "The Gutenberg Parenthesis," Jarvis places us outside the era of print and beyond the world that print created. As transmission of knowledge and creativity shifts off the page and onto the screen, should we celebrate or mourn?

“The problem is the internet is often accused of creating filter bubbles and echo chambers, though there’s a lot of research, ever more research, that says that’s simply not true,” Jarvis says.

“What the internet does is puncture that bubble, and we come to a place where we are exposed to people who we’re unfamiliar with, who are strangers, who may be scary or being made scary by certain forces, and we don’t know how to deal with that.”

Indeed, Jarvis says we can and should learn to appreciate the noisy, even messy, information environment in these digital days.

“My fondest hope for both the internet and its companies and its entities, but also for good old media, is that we find the means to make strangers less strange. I think that’s the most pressing job we have in our society today,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

Watch complete video interview https://youtu.be/huxvB6wPeg0

08/06/2023

Three summers ago, the world seemed frozen – and convulsed – all at once.

The coronavirus pandemic that began in March 2020 and the lockdown orders that followed restricted entire nations only to the most necessary activities. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers in May sparked worldwide demonstrations against racism and brought the Black Lives Matter movement to home pages and front pages everywhere.

36 months later, the world has moved on. Pandemic restrictions have lifted and urban centers are mostly free of protests. But how have we changed? In publishing especially, what is different about our jobs, our professional relationships, and our attitudes?

Did you answer, “Everything”? Or “Nothing?”

That question – “How have we really changed?” – is the challenge presented by Dianndra Roberts, the Senior Publishing Coordinator for the Royal College of Psychiatrists. Dianndra Roberts co-chairs the DEI Advisory Council of the International Society of Managing and Technical Editors and is the DEIA Associate Editor and a chef for The Scholarly Kitchen blog, published by SSP, the Society of Scholarly Publishing.

Dianndra Roberts recently shared with CCC’s Chris Kenneally her reflections on the progress made since the Summer of 2020 toward ending the cycle of racism and discrimination in publishing and everywhere else.

“What does it mean as a Black woman to speak out against racism in your organization and in this profession? Dianndra, has speaking out made you vulnerable to danger, and how do you respond?” Kenneally asked.

“I’m not going to say it was easy, and everything we wanted went the way we wanted it to go, or it didn’t take work,” Roberts replied. “Just to say it as it is, when a group of Black people start to organize, it immediately becomes considered political, even if we just wanted to be able to do peer support with each other, and we were not trying to riot or anything. But naturally, somehow, a group of Black people is a political thing.

“I believe in what I stand for, and I think that we should all be treated well and with the same expression. And if me saying anything I’ve said changes it for the person behind me, then yeah, I’m going to keep doing it. I’m just going to keep doing that.”

https://velocityofcontentpodcast.com/challenging-racism-in-scholarly-publishing/

08/04/2023

In Arkansas, freedom to read advocates have a court victory to celebrate.

07/30/2023

While AI isn’t a new concept in copyright or technology, it’s the top draw for the 2023 Copyright and Technology conference. Organizer Bill Rosenblatt has a preview of the program.

As the volume of AI-generated content grows, determining whether published works are made by humans or created by machines will be increasingly important, notes Rosenblatt.

Conference organizer Bill Rosenblatt has created a program that captures the copyright moment in a single day of panel discussions focused on AI.In a podcast...

07/23/2023

https://velocityofcontentpodcast.com/a-tiktok-challenge-for-publishing/

TikTok challenges can range from the sublime to the ridiculous and even the dangerous. There are challenges over art projects, school bathrooms, and sometimes fatally, boat jumping. Now, TikTok may have a challenge for publishers.

In May, TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, sought a trademark for its own book publishing imprint, to be called 8th Note Press. TechCrunch and others have reported the fledgling publisher is approaching self-published romance authors with offers for book deals. The advances aren’t large, but the implications for the industry are enormous.

TikTok has already made the fortunes of many authors, particularly in trade book publishing, and especially for the romance genre. Mark Gottlieb, vice president and literary agent with Trident Media Group - Literary Agency, believes the video-sharing platform is also having an impact on other publishing markets, including business books.

“Even while TikTok is primarily known more for its entertainment-oriented content, it has definitely a growing community of business professionals and entrepreneurs who share their tips, their insights, and their recommendations related to the business world,” Gottlieb tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“TikTok’s ability to present information in these short or bite-sized, engaging videos can make complex or otherwise difficult-to-understand business concepts a lot more accessible or easily digestible to a broader audience,” he explains.

“So business authors and experts can leverage TikTok to promote their books. They can share a lot of the key takeaways, engage with readers, and thereby potentially expand their reach and influence. The platform’s algorithm-driven content discovery can help business books gain visibility and reach new audiences. So TikTok serves two functions – discovery, in terms of preexisting business books, but also identifying people who could be writing business books.”

07/14/2023

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, are facing numerous copyright infringement lawsuits from authors and artists.

In recent weeks, Paul Tremblay, Mona Awad, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, and Richard Kadrey have all filed litigation, “accusing the companies of using the authors’ copyrighted books without consent to ‘train’ their artificial intelligence software programs,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

In a June 29 statement, the US-based Authors Guild applauded the filing of this litigation.

“These are unprecedented times for writers and creators,” the Authors Guild stated. “Many authors are already reporting a loss of writing income from journalism and business writing due to companies using AI instead of human writers. AI-generated materials also hold the potential to flood the markets, and inevitably lower the value of human authored works.”

“Unlike so many copyright cases, there is a lot of agreement on the issue—that AI needs to have some guardrails, even among people who disagree over copyright law,” notes Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly senior writer.

Copyright infringement lawsuits from authors and artists against creators of Generative AI software are mounting.

07/07/2023

In late June in Chicago, the annual conference of the American Library Association (ALA) drew 16,000 attendees to a program featuring dozens of authors including Ibram X. Kendi and Judy Blume.

“The 2023 attendance was well below the 23,000 the conference drew to its last annual conference in Chicago, in June of 2017,” noted Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly. “But it is a nice bump of more than 13 percent from the 14,000 who participated in last year’s event in Washington, D.C.”

According to the Albanese, the ALA conference highlighted an organized response from the library and publishing communities to politicized attacks on the freedom to read.

“Make no mistake, this year’s ALA was exactly what the library community needed,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “On the show stages, in the meeting rooms, and on the show floor, librarians were praised for their work and all they are doing in standing up for the freedom to read, which was very much the theme of the conference.”

According to PW’s Andrew Albanese, the ALA conference highlighted an organized response from the library and publishing communities to politicized attacks on the freedom to read.