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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...
2026
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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...
Heatwaves and Strategy
It’s hot here. For anyone reading outside the UK, the country broke its June temperature record yesterday, and today may go higher again....
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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 ...
Prompter's Intent
Why GPT-5.5's prompting advice echoes 19th-century military doctrine: the shift from scripting tasks to creating conditions for delegated work to succeed.
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.
Anthropic's Employment Research
A close reading of Anthropic's labour market research: why high task exposure does not mean job replacement, and why the more interesting story may be how work reconfigures rather than disappears.
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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...
Accelerating the Right Things
On the risk of using AI to accelerate the wrong things, and why the collapse in the cost of building makes judgement, not execution, the scarce resource.
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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...
Execution is Free
As AI lowers the cost of execution toward zero, professional value shifts up the stack—from code to judgement, from delivery to deciding what is worth delivering at all.
Twenty Minute Prototyping
What happens when a non-developer builds a playable text adventure and a new blog layout using Claude Code? A reflection on AI as a prototyping tool for those who sit across strategy and execution.
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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...
AI and Marginal Gains
Why AI productivity gains may be better framed as an aggregation of marginal improvements than a company-wide transformation—and a practical framework for finding your own 1% wins.
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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...
Reflections on 2025
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