This edition covers Fable’s offensive AI-generated reading summaries and the lessons for publishers, Scott Belsky’s “Small Teams, Big Businesses” 2025 prediction, Google Cloud’s roundup of 300+ generative AI use cases, fresh allegations about Meta’s use of pirated books for training, an Oxford Internet Institute paper on AI’s net positive impact on employment, and a hands-on test of Avataar’s Velocity product-video tool.

For anyone taking stock of AI developments as the year turns, Simon Willison’s end-of-year roundup is phenomenally good. I recommend reading it in full as it gives a really comprehensive view of what happened and why it matters, but there are several points highlighted below which are particularly relevant to publishers.

(Originally posted on LinkedIn): Every December since 2020, I’ve posted my favourite books of the year here. It’s the biggest month of the year for book sales, many of us will catch up with reading over the holidays, and with the space for book reviews in the media shrinking, authors need all the shares they can get. Caveat: there’s no fiction here (I just haven’t read enough this year) but if the list is a little wonky in both senses of the word, I can genuinely say I enjoyed every book.

This edition covers the UK government’s consultation on copyright and AI, an Amazon job listing that hints at deeper AI use inside the Kindle reading experience, NotebookLM’s enterprise update, Apple Intelligence’s BBC misattribution, a US AI litigation tracker, and what the Betty Crocker Effect can teach us about generative AI.

This edition rounds up a packed week of tech news—OpenAI’s Sora rollout, Google’s Gemini 2 and Deep Research, and Reddit’s new AI search tool—alongside new public-domain training datasets, AI deal trackers, the impact of AI clauses in publishing contracts, and a four-part model of how organisations use AI.

This edition examines the ALCS report on authors and AI training, Pleias’s openly-licensed and energy-efficient LLMs, new content deals from OpenAI/Future Plc and Bertelsmann/ElevenLabs, the risks of AI-generated podcasts, and practical ideas for working creatively with AI.

This edition looks at Steven Johnson’s Long Context project, the Activate 2025 outlook on AI search and disintermediation risks for publishers, the rise of AI shopping assistants like Amazon Rufus, and tech news including Amazon’s expanded Anthropic investment and the new Model Context Protocol standard.

This edition unpacks the HarperCollins–Microsoft AI licensing deal and its wider implications for trade publishing, OpenAI’s o1 models reaching the API, Gemini’s new memory feature, Ben Affleck on AI and craft, research on AI writing in Substack newsletters, and US dates for the IPG AI training course.