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It’s been hard to ignore significant legal and policy developments for AI and publishing in recent days, with a major new class action la...
Publishing
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It’s been a long, hot week on the road, seeing publishers in Dublin, Cambridge and London. Lots of the conversations were about choosing ...
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It’s been another busy week: attending British IP Day at Parliament and the Publishers’ Licensing Service conference, and getting ready f...
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There are twin themes this week: administrative convenience in tools you are already using like Slack and Excel, and more ways for creato...
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This week there is a tight cluster of stories around how AI companies access content, what that is doing to publishers, and the economic ...
AI and Hollywood Accounting
This week Harvard Business Review published an article by E. Glen Weyl and Raul Castro Fernandez, How AI Companies Can Pay Fair Rates for...
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A shorter update this week: seven presentations and workshops in ten days have left me genuinely tired, but they’ve also been the best ki...
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There are two big themes this week: what new AI agents are making possible, and the need for a more nuanced discussion of AI’s impact on ...
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This week’s newsletter focuses on the economics of AI becoming more visible. Sometimes that’s positive for publishers: a new tool for est...
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It’s been a week of jet lag, catch-up and presentations, with a workshop, a webinar for PW and my friends at Westchester Publishing Servi...
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Greetings from Portland, where I’m writing this on the Thursday of IBPA Publishing University—or, as my body clock is telling me, about 0...
Building AI Workflows That Survive Platform Risk
AI platform volatility, pricing changes, usage limits, makes it risky to build workflows inside specific models. The smartest users are using AI as a harness, keeping data and value in their own stack. Optionality matters as much as optimisation.
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It was a quieter week for product releases, but there were significant legal, policy and research developments. I am in Portland, Oregon ...
How AI Affects Publishing Depends on Existing Incentives
New Australian research frames AI training on creative work as a market failure. But economic analysis needs segmentation: AI may cause underproduction in literary publishing while driving overproduction in academic sectors where volume is rewarded.
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Happy Friday. I’m catching up after a week on the road and there is a lot to process. This week my reading and thinking clustered around ...
ECPA Conference Reflections
Reflections from the ECPA Leadership Summit on AI's impact on publishing. Bob Hutchins' proxy failure framework - how AI undermines trust in writing as a signal of thought and effort - connects to George Akerlof's market for lemons: when quality signals break down, adverse selection can collapse markets. The strategic question for publishers is whether they can credibly signal editorial judgement in ways that are costly for low-quality producers to fake.
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It’s been a big couple of weeks for AI image generation and design tools: with major updates from Canva, Google and Anthropic, users are ...
Gen X AI
Three patterns from a week of conversations about how people are actually using AI: capability levelling up, a Gen X sweet spot, and a fundamental shift in the viability of solo and small firms.
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A slightly shorter newsletter than last time as it’s been a particularly busy week: several days of travel, and submitting the manuscript...
What the 2026 SIC Revision Changes for UK Publishing
How the 2026 revision to Standard Industrial Classification codes affect UK book and journal publishing.
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I don’t set out with a particular theme in mind for each week’s newsletter: sometimes the things I’ve found in my research cluster serend...
Strategic Debt and the Hidden Cost of AI Adoption
AI initiatives aren't free gains: they're commitments. Strategic debt explains why more AI capability can mean less organisational clarity and control.
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I’m sending this week’s newsletter a day early, as Friday and Monday are public holidays here in the UK—judging by the out-of-office mess...
Eight Mistakes Organisations Make When Adopting AI
Most organisations adopting AI make the same avoidable mistakes, from defaulting to bundled tools to skipping measurement. Here are eight common failure modes and why they matter.
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For authors, publishers and technology companies, it’s been a week that challenges the old axiom that there’s no such thing as bad public...
The Author's Bargain
How should authors respond to Generative AI? A clear-headed look at strategy, licensing, publisher policies, creative use, and why human authorship may become more valuable, not less.
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It’s been a busy week, with significant developments in copyright policy and a steady drumbeat of new research and product launches. The ...
Four Scenarios for Scholarly Publishing and AI
Four scenarios for scholarly publishing and AI, exploring what happens when AI changes both how knowledge is produced and how it is discovered—and what the enduring role of a publisher might be.
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I’m catching up after three intense days at London Book Fair. That intensity has been mirrored in the AI world, with a slew of copyright ...
London Book Fair 2026 Reflections
Eighteen observations from three days at London Book Fair 2026, including procedural debt, AI adoption maturity, audio publishing, discoverability, and the value of unscheduled conversations.
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It has been a week in which AI moved decisively out of product demos and into politics, newsrooms, courts, and war. Across very different...
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A slightly shorter—and later—newsletter than normal, as I’ve been on the road this week (six webinars and courses in four days—welcome to...
Trade Publishing as a Data Business
Trade publishers generate valuable forward signals—submission patterns, acquisition trends, category momentum—that they have not yet treated as products. Could they follow the Washington Post's playbook?
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In recent months there has been a discernible shift in AI—and the pieces I feature—away from simple chatbots to agentic tools like OpenAI...
Parix Audio Day 2026 Slides
Slides and a brief summary from a keynote at Parix Audio Day 2026 in Madrid on the impact of AI across the audiobook value chain: authors, publishers, narrators and the competitive landscape.
Editors, Authors and Trust
How generative AI is straining the implicit contract between editors and contributors—and what book publishers can do to preserve quality, trust and diversity of voice.
Systems and Meaning
Why publishing's instinctive caution about generative AI coexists with an unusual structural advantage: an industry built on language may be uniquely equipped to work with models that run on it.
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Only two out of nearly three dozen publishing job ads I reviewed this week mentioned AI skills. Meanwhile, the marketing world has moved ...
IPG Spring Conference 2026
Sixteen observations from the IPG Spring Conference 2026: on leisure time, platform risk, AI in workflows, procedural debt, and what it means to think generationally in a structural market shift.
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This week’s stories play out at a distance—in financial markets, academia and big tech—but they point clearly toward future directions fo...
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There are two big themes in this week’s newsletter: utility and accountability, and they don’t sit easily together. The productivity gain...
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This week’s headline stories sit at the uncomfortable boundary between assistance and dependence. From lost intellectual scaffolding to n...
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This week’s AI stories are less about capability and more about control: how models are trained, when licensing works, and where consent ...
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Happy New Year. The first AI stories of 2026 aren’t about speed or scale, but about authenticity—who is speaking, what can be trusted, an...
Books of the Year 2025
(Originally posted on LinkedIn): Every December since 2020, I’ve posted about my books of the year: to mark the passing of the year, as s...
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Publishing seems to have been slowing down for the holidays for the last couple of weeks, and while AI isn’t on quite the same trajectory...
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A slightly shorter newsletter than normal this week, as I have been balancing four days on the road for a conference and board meetings, ...
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This was a week in which AI refused to behave according to anyone’s preferred narrative: strong environmental claims unravelled, legal ca...
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Happy Black Friday. This Sunday marks three years since ChatGPT first appeared: a toddler in human years, already learning to run, leavin...
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This week has been full of stories that show how fast the conversation around AI, authorship, and creative integrity is moving. From new ...
AI and the Novel
A critical look at the Minderoo Centre's report on AI and the novel: why the research captures important attitudes but the headlines overstate what a convenience sample can tell us.
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Hello from Dublin, where I’ve been speaking at the Publishing Ireland conference. It’s been a really excellent day and good to see many s...
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I sent the first of these newsletters a year ago this week, to twenty-seven friends and colleagues. Since then, it’s grown to over 1,500 ...
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Greetings from New York City, where I’ve been on a working vacation for the last week. It’s my first time back since Covid, and besides t...
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For the first time in a while, I didn’t go to Frankfurt Book Fair and experienced it vicariously through Slack, WhatsApp and press update...
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It’s been a heavy week with travel, an IPG Lunch and Learn update and interesting discussions at the BISG AI Working Group. But before pu...
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Another week, another flood of AI product announcements from Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic. But some of this week’s news feels ...
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The approval of the settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic litigation overshadows most other developments for publishers this week. But els...
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A slightly shorter email than usual today, as it’s been a very busy week of travel. I had conversations about AI in some interesting plac...
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This week’s stories point to deeper layers of the AI stack: standards, infrastructure and how organisations are evolving. From licensing ...
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This week’s practical insight focuses on two linked topics: onboarding and oversight of AI models. But there are also more philosophical ...
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The AI and content ecosystem is maturing fast. The big news this week is a settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic with implications for other l...
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AI is changing how people produce, discover and evaluate content. This week’s stories show how fast those shifts are happening. From Amaz...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s response to GPT-5 feedback with a partial model selector and a 140,000-word context window, Drew Breunig on ...
The UK Publishing Industry in 2025
Original research using Companies House data to map over 11,000 UK publishing businesses—their size distribution, geographic spread, and ten-fold growth since 2000.
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As AI capabilities expand, so does the gap between what’s technically possible and what’s useful and meaningful. Many of the links this w...
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This edition covers fresh data on student AI use and ChatGPT’s new Socratic Study Mode, NotebookLM’s new multilingual audio and video ove...
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It’s been a significant week of contrasting AI developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the administration moved swiftly to...
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This edition covers ChatGPT’s new Agent mode and what it could automate for publishers, Matt Webb on governance lessons from Anthropic’s ...
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This edition covers Doug Shapiro’s media-trends slide deck and the questions it poses for any creative business, fresh Cambridge Universi...
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Happy Friday—though I’m writing this the day before on the way back from a great day at the Publishers Licensing Services Conference in L...
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It’s been a really significant week for legal developments: while the newsletter has more of a copyright focus than usual, the courtroom ...
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This edition covers Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s bullish AI update and what billions of agents mean for supplier teams, Turing Institute/LEGO ...
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It’s Friday 13th. Unlucky for AI image platform Midjourney, which is about to find out why “don’t mess with The Mouse” (or an earthier pa...
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Thirty weeks of doing this—thanks for sticking with me. Someone asked this week if this newsletter will be going paid, and to be really c...
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Maybe there will be a quiet week for AI and publishing. If so, we haven’t seen it yet. Across a range of stories this week, the clear the...
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This edition covers the US House passing a tax bill with a ten-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation, OpenAI’s continued lobbying ...
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I’m writing this from a very sunny Edinburgh, where I presented to the lovely Canongate team at their away day. It was great to get off c...
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This week’s newsletter starts with a question that’s been quietly nagging at many of us working with generative AI: are we saving time, o...
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There’s a lot to unpack this week, including a couple of quite contrarian views on the environmental impact of AI and on the use of copyr...
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This edition covers a correction to last week’s link on LLM task length, the new native AI text-analysis formulas in Google Sheets, the l...
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This edition covers the headline findings of Stanford HAI’s 2025 AI Index Report, fresh data on the rapidly growing length of tasks LLMs ...
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This edition covers Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke’s AI-first hiring memo, a behavioural study suggesting reader preferences for human authorsh...
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This edition covers Amazon’s new Nova Act browser-agent model, Google’s Gemini 2.5 reasoning model, Rachel Coldicutt’s responsible-AI dos...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s inline image generation in 4o and the Studio Ghibli controversy that followed, a US court’s refusal to halt ...
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This edition covers Meta’s attempt to block Sarah Wynn Williams’s memoir Careless People and The Atlantic’s forensic exposé of Meta’s tra...
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This edition covers OpenAI’s “freedom-focused” pitch to the Trump administration on AI policy, an FOI revealing Peter Kyle’s use of ChatG...
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This edition covers Google’s new AI Mode Search and what it means for publisher referral traffic, Mistral OCR as a low-cost tool for digi...
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This edition covers a busy week at the IPG Conference and a striking Ethan Mollick chart on AI’s collapsing cost and rising performance, ...
Analysing Public Consultations
(Originally published on LinkedIn): Like many people in publishing, I’ve been formulating a response to the UK Government’s Consultation ...
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This edition covers The Guardian’s licensing deal with OpenAI alongside the New York Times rolling out internal AI tools, reflections fro...
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This edition covers the fractious end to the Paris AI Action Summit and Mistral’s new Le Chat, OpenAI’s plan to unify its product line in...
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This edition covers Adam Hyde’s hands-on demonstration of OpenAI’s Operator agent for research publishing workflows, the unredacted Meta ...
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This edition covers the arrival of DeepSeek and what it means strategically and economically, Apple’s iOS 18.3 changes pausing news summa...
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This edition covers the $500 billion Stargate AI infrastructure consortium, impending litigation between the News Media Alliance and an u...
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This edition features stories on the UK’s national AI strategy, a study of LLMs in education, Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwai...
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This edition covers Fable’s offensive AI-generated reading summaries and the lessons for publishers, Scott Belsky’s “Small Teams, Big Bus...
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For anyone taking stock of AI developments as the year turns, Simon Willison’s end-of-year roundup is phenomenally good. I recommend read...
Books of the Year 2024
(Originally posted on LinkedIn): Every December since 2020, I’ve posted my favourite books of the year here. It’s the biggest month of th...
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This edition covers the UK government’s consultation on copyright and AI, an Amazon job listing that hints at deeper AI use inside the Ki...
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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 ...
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This edition examines the ALCS report on authors and AI training, Pleias’s openly-licensed and energy-efficient LLMs, new content deals f...
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This edition looks at Steven Johnson’s Long Context project, the Activate 2025 outlook on AI search and disintermediation risks for publi...
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This edition unpacks the HarperCollins–Microsoft AI licensing deal and its wider implications for trade publishing, OpenAI’s o1 models re...
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This edition covers Google’s new AI video tool for Workspace customers, a US federal ruling dismissing a copyright suit against OpenAI, f...
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This edition covers the dispute over an AI-generated cover for Jodi Picoult’s new book, Anthropic’s new CSV analysis feature in Claude, t...
Books of the Year 2023
(Originally posted on LinkedIn): It’s become a habit each December for me to post about the best books that I read this year. For the fou...
Geopolitics, Publishing and TikTok
TikTok's geopolitical vulnerability is a prompt for publishers to ask a harder question: what proportion of your social audience are you migrating to channels you own?
A Fair Share in the Circular Economy
Original research estimating the UK secondhand book market at £360–500 million, and what it means for author earnings and the AuthorShare compensation scheme.