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...
2025
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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...
Brooklyn Bridge Parkrun
I’m in New York with the family. We were up early for Brooklyn Bridge Parkrun—a very enjoyable, fast, flat course along the waterfront—fo...
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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...
BookNet Canada Update
A follow-up to the September 2024 BookNet Canada presentation: how the industry's questions have shifted from broad AI concerns to practical implementation, copyright and employment.
Swedish Publishers Association Webinar
A short overview of a webinar delivered for the Swedish Publishers Association on recent AI trends, how publishers are approaching them, and practical examples of AI tools in use.
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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...