Five Things: October 3, 2024
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_ONE
California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it | Emma Roth
When the law comes into effect next year, it will ban digital storefronts from using terms like “buy” or “purchase,” unless they inform customers that they’re not getting unrestricted access to whatever they’re buying. Storefronts will have to tell customers they’re getting a license that can be revoked as well as provide a list of all the restrictions that come along with it.
Everyone “knows” they don’t actually own most digital content no matter how much they paid for it (or the myriad subscription services providing them access to it), but the main response has typically been that most people prefer convenience over ownership nowadays anyway. That is, until a license for something they love expires and that content disappears; or it’s arbitrarily updated, and the original version is lost; or it’s not available at all because other embedded licenses or contracts make it unprofitable to keep accessible.
Never mind the archival side of things, where a lot of movies, TV shows, books, and games published over the past 5-10 years never got a physical release of any kind, and most of it is shackled to one of a handful of providers’ digital platforms (unless it’s more profitable to move it exclusively to a different one).
While I think this law is a step in the right direction (even if the average consumer won’t give it a second thought), I’m hoping it also plays a role in making proposed legislation related to ebook licenses and libraries more palatable.
__TWO
The European Accessibility Act for non-EU members | Laura Brady
The EAA applies to currently published titles in addition to a publisher’s backlist. There is real concern that hundreds of thousands of titles will disappear from the market because of fear of an EAA fine. And fixing the backlist can be a herculean task, to be sure. Remediating these ebooks can generate high costs, due to the lack of appropriate tools, the level of complexity of the different categories of books, or the difficulties in converting them related to the fact that they were created when the standards and the formats did not include accessibility features.
Brady gave a presentation on this topic at the Publishing Innovation Forum last week, but I missed it because it overlapped with a Supply Chain session that was more broadly relevant to the day job, so I’m glad she has this helpful overview available on her site.
Working for a digital vendor that serves schools and libraries, I think about accessibility a lot, particularly how much more difficult it is for visual content like comics and manga, which are apparently exempt from these requirements. The thought of thousands of older regular ebooks disappearing because they were hastily converted in the gold rush 15 years ago and haven’t been touched since is a sad one, though, and few publishers care about archival concerns if there’s not a profitable angle to it.
I also wonder how this will impact Controlled Digital Lending projects, many of which rely on lower-quality scans of print books that are usually (but not always) unavailable in digital format. At least in those scenarios, a print version still exists… as long as it wasn’t destroyed in the scanning process.
___THREE
The Chilling Effect Is Real | Jonna Perrillo
Weak leadership and lack of administrative support—not parental or community activism—are the No. 1 reason teachers cite for altering, limiting, or otherwise censoring their instruction.
As we’re in the home stretch of an historic national election, we’re seeing the impact of the politically motivated challenges of books across the country morph back into its true form. Having mostly failed in courts, soft censorship is the biggest victory book banners can claim because it spreads far beyond their arbitrary challenges of individual books, making it easier to further marginalize “controversial” people and life experiences to avoid potential controversy.
It also aligns with the evergreen attacks on public education, the reliable red meat that drives turnout for “conservatives” who want to tear down public institutions, including democracy itself. As is often the case, Perrillo demonstrates that the killers (or at least their accomplices) were already in the house.
____FOUR
The half-a-million-dollar decision that still haunts the book industry | Claire Mabe
The resource-starved literary sector’s dismay at news that a tech startup got half a million dollars was tied up in the fact that the fund was a departure from the funding environment they knew, and the arrival of a system that enabled tech companies to apply for and receive arts and culture investment.
This is a fascinating look at a relatively standard wannabe disruptive startup in publishing, launched by people who don’t actually understand publishing — nor readers, it seems. The twist in this one is that they managed to get a $500k COVID grant for “innovation” with a version of the pitch decks I’ve routinely seen and eviscerated over the years.
As I was reading, I was expecting the reveal to be someone I recognized from my brief time with the Reading Room, because the playbook was disappointingly similar to that barely notable failure. My guess is we’re only a couple of years away from seeing some AI-related nonsense pulling something similar in the US, with Literary Lit Monthly: Creative Writing by [and for] The Machine Gods winning the Open AI Genius Grant.
_____FIVE
This is why we don’t use AI: A Story in Screenshots | Abby Rice
Why did you remove all the updates? They were not good and didn’t represent the products at all, and mostly just consisted of AI-filler that wasn’t even great SEO. We’d prefer it if you didn’t do this again.
Several weeks ago, after spending many hours digging through a publisher’s metadata for a couple thousand titles, I wondered how anyone believed AI might be useful for cleaning up subject headings and descriptions across a large backlist, one of the more mundane but laudable proposals I’ve seen this year. Garbage in, garbage out is a basic rule of thumb for all LLMs, though, and book metadata is notoriously bad despite having a pretty robust standard in place for it for since 2009 (or earlier depending on which version you want to consider robust enough).
Never mind the fundamental problem of handing over the entire content of every book you’ve published to be put into someone else’s system for “analysis” (of course they’ll keep it segregated and not use it to train their underlying system; pinky swear is in the fine print!), but only hardcore technophiles actually believe these systems can churn out well-crafted, relevant marketing descriptions and appropriate subject headings without spending way more time on refining prompts (book by book?) than experienced professionals would have if they’d written and/or revised everything from scratch.
“In the world of bars and walls…”
Coincidentally, Microcosm published this post a couple of weeks later demonstrating exactly why this is a terrible idea, with some glorious examples from a couple of partners who are trying to push these concepts of a plan out as actual products, which they definitely hope to be able to charge people to use in the near future. #cmonson
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