#prh

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Penguin Random House, AI, and writers’ rights

NEXT WEDNESDAY (October 23) at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, GEORGIA, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

My friend Teresa Nielsen Hayden is a wellspring of wise sayings, like "you're not responsible for what you do in other people's dreams," and my all time favorite, from the Napster era: "Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side."

The record labels hated Napster, and so did many musicians, and when those musicians sided with their labels in the legal and public relations campaigns against file-sharing, they lent both legal and public legitimacy to the labels' cause, which ultimately prevailed.

But the labels weren't on musicians' side. The demise of Napster and with it, the idea of a blanket-license system for internet music distribution (similar to the systems for radio, live performance, and canned music at venues and shops) firmly established that new services must obtain permission from the labels in order to operate.

That era is very good for the labels. The three-label cartel – Universal, Warner and Sony – was in a position to dictate terms like Spotify, who handed over billions of dollars worth of stock, and let the Big Three co-design the royalty scheme that Spotify would operate under.

If you know anything about Spotify payments, it's probably this: they are extremely unfavorable to artists. This is true – but that doesn't mean it's unfavorable to the Big Three labels. The Big Three get guaranteed monthly payments (much of which is booked as "unattributable royalties" that the labels can disperse or keep as they see fit), along with free inclusion on key playlists and other valuable services. What's more, the ultra-low payouts to artists increase the value of the labels' stock in Spotify, since the less Spotify has to pay for music, the better it looks to investors.

The Big Three – who own 70% of all music ever recorded, thanks to an orgy of mergers – make up the shortfall from these low per-stream rates with guaranteed payments and promo.

But the indy labels and musicians that account for the remaining 30% are out in the cold. They are locked into the same fractional-penny-per-stream royalty scheme as the Big Three, but they don't get gigantic monthly cash guarantees, and they have to pay the playlist placement the Big Three get for free.

Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

In a very important, material sense, creative workers – writers, filmmakers, photographers, illustrators, painters and musicians – are not on the same side as the labels, agencies, studios and publishers that bring our work to market. Those companies are not charities; they are driven to maximize profits and an important way to do that is to reduce costs, including and especially the cost of paying us for our work.

It's easy to miss this fact because the workers at these giant entertainment companies are our class allies. The same impulse to constrain payments to writers is in play when entertainment companies think about how much they pay editors, assistants, publicists, and the mail-room staff. These are the people that creative workers deal with on a day to day basis, and they are on our side, by and large, and it's easy to conflate these people with their employers.

This class war need not be the central fact of creative workers' relationship with our publishers, labels, studios, etc. When there are lots of these entertainment companies, they compete with one another for our work (and for the labor of the workers who bring that work to market), which increases our share of the profit our work produces.

But we live in an era of extreme market concentration in every sector, including entertainment, where we deal with five publishers, four studios, three labels, two ad-tech companies and a single company that controls all the ebooks and audiobooks. That concentration makes it much harder for artists to bargain effectively with entertainments companies, and that means that it's possible -likely, even – for entertainment companies to gain market advantages that aren't shared with creative workers. In other words, when your field is dominated by a cartel, you may be on on their side, but they're almost certainly not on your side.

This week, Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the history of the human race, made headlines when it changed the copyright notice in its books to ban AI training:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/penguin-random-house-underscores-copyright-protection-in-ai-rebuff

The copyright page now includes this phrase:

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

Many writers are celebrating this move as a victory for creative workers' rights over AI companies, who have raised hundreds of billions of dollars in part by promising our bosses that they can fire us and replace us with algorithms.

But these writers are assuming that just because they're on Penguin Random House's side, PRH is on their side. They're assuming that if PRH fights against AI companies training bots on their work for free, that this means PRH won't allow bots to be trained on their work at all.

This is a pretty naive take. What's far more likely is that PRH will use whatever legal rights it has to insist that AI companies pay it for the right to train chatbots on the books we write. It is vanishingly unlikely that PRH will share that license money with the writers whose books are then shoveled into the bot's training-hopper. It's also extremely likely that PRH will try to use the output of chatbots to erode our wages, or fire us altogether and replace our work with AI slop.

This is speculation on my part, but it's informed speculation. Note that PRH did not announce that it would allow authors to assert the contractual right to block their work from being used to train a chatbot, or that it was offering authors a share of any training license fees, or a share of the income from anything produced by bots that are trained on our work.

Indeed, as publishing boiled itself down from the thirty-some mid-sized publishers that flourished when I was a baby writer into the Big Five that dominate the field today, their contracts have gotten notably, materially worse for writers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

This is completely unsurprising. In any auction, the more serious bidders there are, the higher the final price will be. When there were thirty potential bidders for our work, we got a better deal on average than we do now, when there are at most five bidders.

Though this is self-evident, Penguin Random House insists that it's not true. Back when PRH was trying to buy Simon & Schuster (thereby reducing the Big Five publishers to the Big Four), they insisted that they would continue to bid against themselves, with editors at Simon & Schuster (a division of PRH) bidding against editors at Penguin (a division of PRH) and Random House (a division of PRH).

This is obvious nonsense, as Stephen King said when he testified against the merger (which was subsequently blocked by the court): "You might as well say you’re going to have a husband and wife bidding against each other for the same house. It would be sort of very gentlemanly and sort of, 'After you' and 'After you'":

https://apnews.com/article/stephen-king-government-and-politics-b3ab31d8d8369e7feed7ce454153a03c

Penguin Random House didn't become the largest publisher in history by publishing better books or doing better marketing. They attained their scale by buying out their rivals. The company is actually a kind of colony organism made up of dozens of once-independent publishers. Every one of those acquisitions reduced the bargaining power of writers, even writers who don't write for PRH, because the disappearance of a credible bidder for our work into the PRH corporate portfolio reduces the potential bidders for our work no matter who we're selling it to.

I predict that PRH will not allow its writers to add a clause to their contracts forbidding PRH from using their work to train an AI. That prediction is based on my direct experience with two of the other Big Five publishers, where I know for a fact that they point-blank refused to do this, and told the writer that any insistence on including this contract would lead to the offer being rescinded.

The Big Five have remarkably similar contracting terms. Or rather, unremarkably similar contracts, since concentrated industries tend to converge in their operational behavior. The Big Five are similar enough that it's generally understood that a writer who sues one of the Big Five publishers will likely find themselves blackballed at the rest.

My own agent gave me this advice when one of the Big Five stole more than $10,000 from me – canceled a project that I was part of because another person involved with it pulled out, and then took five figures out of the killfee specified in my contract, just because they could. My agent told me that even though I would certainly win that lawsuit, it would come at the cost of my career, since it would put me in bad odor with all of the Big Five.

The writers who are cheering on Penguin Random House's new copyright notice are operating under the mistaken belief that this will make it less likely that our bosses will buy an AI in hopes of replacing us with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

That's not true. Giving Penguin Random House the right to demand license fees for AI training will do nothing to reduce the likelihood that Penguin Random House will choose to buy an AI in hopes of eroding our wages or firing us.

But something else will! The US Copyright Office has issued a series of rulings, upheld by the courts, asserting that nothing made by an AI can be copyrighted. By statute and international treaty, copyright is a right reserved for works of human creativity (that's why the "monkey selfie" can't be copyrighted):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

All other things being equal, entertainment companies would prefer to pay creative workers as little as possible (or nothing at all) for our work. But as strong as their preference for reducing payments to artists is, they are far more committed to being able to control who can copy, sell and distribute the works they release.

In other words, when confronted with a choice of "We don't have to pay artists anymore" and "Anyone can sell or give away our products and we won't get a dime from it," entertainment companies will pay artists all day long.

Remember that dope everyone laughed at because he scammed his way into winning an art contest with some AI slop then got angry because people were copying "his" picture? That guy's insistence that his slop should be entitled to copyright is far more dangerous than the original scam of pretending that he painted the slop in the first place:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/artist-appeals-copyright-denial-for-prize-winning-ai-generated-work/

If PRH was intervening in these Copyright Office AI copyrightability cases to say AI works can't be copyrighted, that would be an instance where we were on their side and they were on our side. The day they submit an amicus brief or rulemaking comment supporting no-copyright-for-AI, I'll sing their praises to the heavens.

But this change to PRH's copyright notice won't improve writers' bank-balances. Giving writers the ability to control AI training isn't going to stop PRH and other giant entertainment companies from training AIs with our work. They'll just say, "If you don't sign away the right to train an AI with your work, we won't publish you."

The biggest predictor of how much money an artist sees from the exploitation of their work isn't how many exclusive rights we have, it's how much bargaining power we have. When you bargain against five publishers, four studios or three labels, any new rights you get from Congress or the courts is simply transferred to them the next time you negotiate a contract.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism:

Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving your bullied schoolkid more lunch money. No matter how much you give them, the bullies will take it all. Give your kid enough lunch money and the bullies will be able to bribe the principle to look the other way. Keep giving that kid lunch money and the bullies will be able to launch a global appeal demanding more lunch money for hungry kids!

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

As creative workers' fortunes have declined through the neoliberal era of mergers and consolidation, we've allowed ourselves to be distracted with campaigns to get us more copyright, rather than more bargaining power.

There are copyright policies that get us more bargaining power. Banning AI works from getting copyright gives us more bargaining power. After all, just because AI can't do our job, it doesn't follow that AI salesmen can't convince our bosses to fire us and replace us with incompetent AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

Then there's "copyright termination." Under the 1976 Copyright Act, creative workers can take back the copyright to their works after 35 years, even if they sign a contract giving up the copyright for its full term:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Creative workers from George Clinton to Stephen King to Stan Lee have converted this right to money – unlike, say, longer terms of copyright, which are simply transferred to entertainment companies through non-negotiable contractual clauses. Rather than joining our publishers in fighting for longer terms of copyright, we could be demanding shorter terms for copyright termination, say, the right to take back a popular book or song or movie or illustration after 14 years (as was the case in the original US copyright system), and resell it for more money as a risk-free, proven success.

Until then, remember, just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. They don't want to prevent AI slop from reducing your wages, they just want to make sure it's their AI slop puts you on the breadline.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce/#just-because-youre-on-their-side-it-doesnt-mean-theyre-on-your-side

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Have you heard anything more about future books from him? I know she’s been teasing a memoir but would that be a part of his PHR deal or the wish fulfillment/manifestation PR she likes to do? If I recall, there was talk of a second book to Spare or a paperback with extra chapters but it got nixed. At one point, there was mention of a professional leadership book they were going to write. As someone who works in professional leadership/org development, I am curious and somewhat horrified to think they have the knowledge and experience to write a book like that. Between the two of them, it’s The Bench and Spare, but I thought the PHR deal was four books? Do you recall any of this?

Nope, haven’t heard anything.

PRH only confirmed a memoir. Here’s the press release announcing the deal with Harry. It confirms only Spare and its audiobook.

The Daily Mail is the source of all the other rumors about the book deal but as far as I know, PRH has never said anything else about Harry’s contract.

[hollymbryan]

Blog Tour: Top 5 Reasons to Read PLAN A by Deb Caletti!

Welcome to Book-Keeping and my stop on the TBR and Beyond Tours blog tour for Plan A by Deb Caletti, which is OUT TODAY! I've got all the book details for you below, along with my top five reasons to read this latest Caletti contemporary.

About the Book

title: Plan A author: Deb Caletti publisher: Labyrinth Road release date: 3 October 2023

A sixteen-year-old girl’s road trip across the country to get an abortion becomes a transformative journey of vulnerability, strength, and above all, choice. From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World , this is both an achingly tender love story and a bold, badly needed battle cry about bodily autonomy and the experiences that connect us. Ivy can’t entirely believe it when the plus sign appears on the test. She didn’t even know it was possible from . . . what happened. But it is, and now she is, and instead of spending the summer working at the local drugstore and swooning over her boyfriend, Lorenzo, suddenly she’s planning a cross-country road trip to her grandmother’s house on the West Coast, where she can legally obtain an abortion. Escaping her small Texas town and the judgment of her friends and neighbors, Ivy hits the road with Lorenzo, who, determined to make the best of their “abortion road trip love story,” has transformed the journey into a whirlwind tour of the all the way from Paris, Texas, to Rome, Oregon . . . and every rest-stop diner and corny roadside attraction along the way. And while Ivy can’t run from the incessant pressure of others’ opinions about her body or from her own expectations and insecurities, she discovers a new world of healing and hope. As the women she encounters share their stories, she chips away at the stigma, silence, and shame surrounding reproductive rights while those collective experiences guide her to her own rightful destination. Content Warning: Abortion, harassment, assault, rape, trauma

Add to Goodreads: Plan A Purchase the Book: Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org

About the Author

Deb Caletti is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of over twenty books for adults and young adults, including Honey, Baby, Sweetheart, a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Heart in a Body in the World, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her books have also won the Josette Frank Award for Fiction, the Washington State Book Award, and numerous other state awards and honors, and she was a finalist for the PEN USA Award. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Connect with Deb: Website | Instagram | Goodreads | Facebook

Top 5 Reasons to Read

It's Deb Caletti. Isn't that enough?! I read and reviewed A Heart in a Body in the World when it released, and I *still* think about it to this day. She writes YA contemporary like no other.

I don't think there is any topic more relevant and urgent to the lives of young women than abortion -- the right to healthcare, the right to make one's own choices, the right to control one's own body.

The mother in this book is strong and amazing and supportive, and it was wonderful to read such a present and powerful parental character in YA.

The trip across country that Ivy and Lorenzo make is whimsical and fun while also leading to Ivy figuring out more who she is and what she wants. It may seem weird to have the trip to get an abortion be like this, but when reading you realize it makes perfect sense.

Perhaps my most favorite aspect of the book, and my top reason to read it, is the character of Lorenzo. Ivy's boyfriend not only supports whatever choice she wants to make, he calculates the travel route that takes them through all the "world cities" between Paris, Texas and Manhattan Beach, Oregon -- from Lima, Oklahoma to Naples, Utah to Rome, Oregon. He knows how desperately Ivy wishes to see the world, and he wants to give it to her, making my heart completely full.

While this isn't a traditional review, I do have to say this is a 5-star book for me for sure. I want to put it in the hands of every teen reader I come across -- and parents, too! It's beautifully written and empowering, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thank you so much to the publisher, author, and TBR and Beyond for the early copy of the book and for having me on tour!

[kuwtsussexes]

The World Central Kitchen Cookbook includes a Lemon Olive Oil Cake recipe from Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.

[pianostrings]

Social commentary on Roald Dahl controversy aside, people buying into the cultural outrage by running out to buy the ‘current’ books thinking millions of editions will disappear overnight.

Meanwhile, Penguin Random House execs:

[funblaater]

watch

[girlwithnoface]

doing interviews for the one job you really didnt want oh what if i died

[mutsukiss]

I'm so fucking bored I miss dog sim games sm but literally none of them are good ahhghhhgghgh

[lilibetbombshell]

[maggotwithanf]

IDW shitcanning everyone's book

[booksteacupandreviews]

Vampiric Vacation by Kiersten White - gothic middle-grade mystery

Vampiric Vacation by Kiersten White – gothic middle-grade mystery

Vampiric Vacation is fun, unusual, and gothic middle-grade mystery with lovely main characters and interesting mystery. It is an amazing book for middle-grade readers. Vampiric Vacation (Sinister Summer Series #2) by Kiersten White Publication Date : September 27, 2022 Publisher : Delacorte Press Read Date : December 30, 2022 Genre : Middle Grade / Gothic Mystery Pages : 320 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating:…

[revenantghost]

Dark Horse released a statement a while back!

It's going to release on either the 4th or the 11th, depending on if you want to go by Dark Horse's website, or Penguin Random House.

wait what happened 2 the trigun reprint btw like is that a fr thing or did it just go away

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Richard Luscombe at The Guardian:

Six major book publishers have teamed up to sue the US state of Florida over an “unconstitutional” law that has seen hundreds of titles purged from school libraries following rightwing challenges. The landmark action targets the “sweeping book removal provisions” of House Bill 1069, which required school districts to set up a mechanism for parents to object to anything they considered pornographic or inappropriate. A central plank of Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke” on Florida campuses, the law has been abused by rightwing activists who quickly realized that any book they challenged had to be immediately removed and replaced only after the exhaustion of a lengthy and cumbersome review process, if at all, the publishers say. Since it went into effect last July, countless titles have been removed from elementary, middle and high school libraries, including American classics such as Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain.

Contemporary novels by bestselling authors such as Margaret Atwood, Judy Blume and Stephen King have also been removed, as well as The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank’s gripping account of the Holocaust, according to the publishers. “Florida HB 1069’s complex and overbroad provisions have created chaos and turmoil across the state, resulting in thousands of historic and modern classics, works we are proud to publish, being unlawfully labeled obscene and removed from shelves,” Dan Novack, vice-president and associate general counsel of Penguin Random House (PRH), said in a statement. “Students need access to books that reflect a wide range of human experiences to learn and grow. It’s imperative for the education of our young people that teachers and librarians be allowed to use their professional expertise to match our authors’ books to the right reader at the right time in their life.” PRH is joined in the action by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster and Sourcebooks. The 94-page lawsuit, which also features as plaintiffs the Authors Guild and a number of individual writers, was filed in federal court in Orlando on Thursday.

The suit contends the book removal provisions violate previous supreme court decisions relating to reviewing works for their literary, artistic, political and scientific value as a whole while considering any potential obscenity; and seeks to restore the discretion “of trained educators to evaluate books holistically to avoid harm to students who will otherwise lose access to a wide range of viewpoints”. “Book bans censor authors’ voices, negating and silencing their lived experience and stories,” Mary Rasenberger, chief executive of the Authors Guild, said in the statement. “These bans have a chilling effect on what authors write about, and they damage authors’ reputations by creating the false notion that there is something unseemly about their books. “Yet these same books have edified young people for decades, expanding worlds and fostering self-esteem and empathy for others. We all lose out when authors’ truths are censored.” Separate from the publishers’ action, a group of three parents filed their own lawsuit in June, insisting that the law discriminated against parents who oppose book bans and censorship because it allowed others to dictate what their children can and cannot read.

Six major publishers sue Florida over book ban law HB1069.

[dominiqueramseyart]

New book announcement!!

I have the pleasure of illustrating the New York Times obituaries desk's Too Big for History: 10 overlooked icons. My first non-fiction book coming in 2026 and published by Crown/PRH.

[adventure-time-news]

Summary of all the upcoming Adventure Time junk we know about!

7th May 2024: Amazing and Awesome Coloring Book

This activity book will be published by Penguin Random House in a few weeks. Source.

===

3rd September 2024: Journey to Ooo

This is another Penguin Random House book. It will adapt two episodes: Dungeon and Fionna and Cake. It is part of PRH's Screen Comix line, which means it will just be screenshots from the two episodes with speech bubbles and stuff edited over the top. Source.

===

15th October 2024: Adventure Time Compendium Vol. 1

This will be the first piece of Adventure Time merch published by Oni Press, who have taken over from Boom Studios as the main publishers of the Adventure Time comics. The Compendium will collect issues 1 to 35 of the original 2012 Adventure Time run. It's not clear whether or not it will also contain the backup stories from those issues, or just the main stories. Presumably there will be a Vol. 2 at some point collecting issues 36 to 75, but that has not been announced yet. Source.

===

12th November 2024: The Fionna and Cake Compendium

Similar to the other compendium, this will not contain any new stories but will collect existing ones. It will include the original Fionna & Cake comic miniseries, the Fionna & Cake: Card Wars miniseries, and a selection of other comics from across the franchise. Source.

===

March 2025: Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game

I made a post about this earlier today.

===

2025: Unannounced Oni Press comic series and graphic novels

We have no idea what these are going to be yet! Source.

===

Probably 2025: Fionna and Cake Season 2

We have no release date yet for the second season of this show. It's probably still a while off, as it didn't enter production until after the first season aired. Source.

===

That's everything for now, as far as I'm aware. Stay tuned!

[miserywizard]

"what's wrong with keanu reeves" HE'S NOT A GREAT WRITER, IN FACT.

it's a good thing i no longer know anyone published at penguin random house because i would be knocking down their door to tell their library marketing person to let me have the egalley to a drop of corruption i need it i need to read one more rjb book so my top author this year isn't fucking KEANU REEVES.