EdTech News Roundup: Self-Publishing Edition

Just a quick post on an article I’d bookmarked and some conjectures on intersections with past readings.

The article in question discusses a tiny sampling of publishers’ reactions to the AI publishing startup, Spines. Industry reaction here is of course pessimistic at best and hostile at worst. Nobody would expect otherwise where a disruption of status quo is involved. Whether the offering really is predatory for would-be authors is beyond the scope of my current reading.

There’s an intuitive appeal to disintermediation and self-determination for authors, but the last offering I saw with similar stated value prop was Publishing.com, which remains encumbered by allegations of unethical conduct. Perhaps Spines will be different? In any case, Spines wouldn’t really be offering disintermediation so much as different-mediation with potentially higher returns for authors.

The industry quotes in the Guardian article seem to posit that the value for authors isn’t really there. This adds up if you take the view that publishers are subsidizing less established and viral authors by means of their megastars, a claim posited in Elle Griffin’s much-shared Penguin vs DOJ write-up in April. However, in digging this article back up I found that many others have taken exception to this interpretation, so it’s unclear whether it’s valid or not. And if it is indeed invalid, then what’s the value prop that the publishing industry is laying claim to on behalf of its authors?

The superstar effect is of course real, relevant, and undeniable. The jockeying, then, could be primarily strategic counter-messaging on the parts of publishers trying to maintain a hold on marketshare. At the same time, the market exposure provided by publishers to authors can be presumed to exist as well.

Publishers probably need to speed adoption of new technology to lower their overhead while maintaining their expertise in marketing and sales. Spines could offer an enterprise solution to publishers, but they would need to arrange contracts to not lose scale.