Artificial intelligence continues to insinuate itself into various aspects of publishing worldwide, and the scale and speed at which the technology is evolving can be daunting even to experts. The sea change has some in the U.K. publishing scene looking at U.S. domination of the AI market and worried about falling behind.
“What we’ve seen is a period of real concern about the impact of the technology, but the mood now seems to be more pragmatic,” says George Walkley, a U.K. consultant focused on AI and publishing who previously spent 15 years at Hachette. “I think there are really interesting things happening in the U.K. book scene.”
Vicky Hartley, deputy managing director at Watkins Media, the parent company of fiction and nonfiction publisher Collective Ink, is using software from AI startup Storywise to automate submission workflows in an effort to ensure that editors don’t lose good queries in crowded inboxes. Storywise claims its software can match the taste of individual editors with manuscripts and summarize key information, create synopses, provide comp titles, and even offer critiques. But it doesn’t decide what to publish—that remains a human decision.
Hartley praises the software as helping the company “reject fewer books at the wrong stage”—i.e., after several rounds of resource-consuming human assessment. “And the books that make it through are better suited to the publisher and more likely to result in a contract.”
Entrepreneur Georgia Kirke has developed Clio, an AI-enabled writing platform that allows authors to speak their business books into existence rather than type them out. As writers respond to prompts about business objectives, target audience, and key topics, the software functions as a technological ghostwriter, editing and structuring the book. It speeds up the creation of the first draft, after which, “we have a human editing team, human proofreaders, human book designers, and human marketers,” Kirke says. “It’s an AI-human collaboration.”
It helps that Clio primarily produces business and self-help books, which are relatively formulaic. “We distilled the key qualities of a good nonfiction book together into a formula that could be repeated by anybody with a strong message at any point in their career,” Kirke says. “They don’t even have to have writing skill.”
Clio Books currently has more than 200 clients writing books with the software. Some of the books are still in draft form, some are moving through the editing process, and others are nearly ready for production, “There is a stereotype that publishing somehow isn’t innovative or doesn’t embrace new things,” Kirke says. “I haven’t found that to be true.”
Library and academic communities have been among the first to embrace new technologies in publishing. Looking to shake up those markets in the U.K. is subscription-based digital library Perlego, which holds a collection of more than one million books covering 1,000 topics. The challenge is that users can get lost in a sea of information, which is often presented without appropriate sourcing or citations. Here, AI has come to the rescue via Perlego’s SmartSearch technology, which allows semantic-language searches that also deliver citations. “You will know exactly where all the information is from because you will have all the sources,” says Perlego cofounder Gauthier Van Malderen. “You can search for a book. You can highlight and annotate it. You can create all your references.”
Oxford University Press also employs AI to help users navigate its digital law library of 600 books and 10,000 journal articles. The service, dubbed Oxford Law Pro, is an AI-driven “research assistant” that aims to expedite how attorneys search case law for precedents. Still, says John Campbell, product strategy director for OUP’s academic division, while the AI is impressive, it can’t yet replace traditional research.
Looking at the big picture, Walkley is upbeat about the future of innovation in digital publishing in the U.K. “The technology isn’t perfect,” he says, “but it isn’t going away either, and people are seeing use cases where they can get some good things from AI.”
Mark Piesing is a freelance journalist and author in Oxford, U.K.
