Today, over four million books are published annually, which is nearly 15 times more than the number published just twenty years ago. This change is largely driven by the surge in self-publishing platforms and print-on-demand technology, both of which effectively eliminate  the traditional barriers to entry to the book publishing industry – access to global markets (thank you, internet!) and the significant investment needed to produce books by offset printing methods. So today, virtually anyone can publish and sell their own book for little investment beyond the labor it takes to write, format, and upload a book for sale to the global marketplace.

I say “any *one*” , but should actually say any *entity* may self-publish their books and add bricks to our growing Tower of Babel, because, thanks to the rapid advancements of Artificial Intelligence (AI), robots like “Hal” and his younger brother, an Anthropic code string called  “Claude,” can now write and publish books too, in the blink of an eye, after training on whole libraries of refined human thought and creativity housed in published books, authored by humans over millennia of recorded civilization.

Human Authors object! One OBS author, whose three books we agented and sold to MIT Press back in the 1990s, is a plaintiff in the landmark Bartz v. Anthropic copyright class action suit. Anthropic recently agreed to a record $1.5 billion settlement to compensate authors and publishers for using hundreds of thousands of pirated books to train their AI models like Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) loved and leveraged by many. Authors and publishers who have opted into the suit stand to receive some $3,000 to $3,100 per book as their share of the settlement,  once finalized.  The settlement faces challenges from class members objecting to high attorneys’ fees and unresolved issues regarding future IP protections.

Meantime, Hal and Claude enjoy an open and largely unregulated internetworked environment in which to further challenge and cajole their bipedal creators to new kinds of thought and productivity. Watch this space.