A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.
Spines isn’t the only tech firm trying to make its mark on publishing. Last week tech giant Microsoft launched its own imprint, 8080 Books, in order to accelerate it, telling the Guardian that “technology has quickened the pace of almost every industry except publishing”. While ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, also announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its own imprint, 8th Note Press.
Spines recently secured $16m in seed funding and claims to have so far published 273 titles in 2024, 33 of which were published on the same day in September. “We want to publish up to 8,000 books next year. The goal is to help a million authors publish their books,” Yehuda Niv, c.e.o and co-founder of Spines told The Bookseller.
Niv said he realised “three years ago that the publishing industry was about to be disrupted by this emerging technology named AI”. At the time, he ran a hybrid publisher and publishing services business in Israel called Niv Books. “I realised I had two options: either to be made irrelevant by AI, or to lead this opportunity in the world,” he said.
Of course, AI is already “disrupting” the publishing industry, with last week’s news that HarperCollins US is asking some of its non-fiction authors for permission to license their books to Microsoft to train its large language models (LLMs), following on from a slew of university presses, including Sage, Taylor & Francis and Wiley, who have already made deals offering tech firms their backlists to train chatbots and other AI tools. In early November, The Bookseller reported that Simon & Schuster-owned Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning (VBK) was “trialling” the use of AI to translate a limited number of its titles into English.
Like Microsoft’s 8080 Books, Spines has a focus on speed. Niv claimed the platform can reduce the time it takes to publish a book from six to 18 months, to two to three weeks. He claimed authors are willing to pay “tens of thousands” on publishing services for self-published books, but Spines costs $1,200 to $5,000 to automate proofreading, cover design, metadata optimisation and limited translation services, starting with Spanish.
Authors pay for the publishing services and retain 100% of their royalties as well as rights to their words once their books are in the world, which looks like self-publishing. Niv, however, claims Spines “isn’t self-publishing, is not a traditional publisher and is not a vanity publisher”. He added: “We are a publishing platform. That’s a new concept.”
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