It is 70 years this year since Roald Dahl published his 1954 short story collection Someone Like You.
One of the tales, The Great Automatic Grammatizator, tells of an engineer named Adolph Knipe who believes the rules governing English grammar to be so strict that a machine programmed with them would be able to create sentences and stories quicker and more efficiently than a human writer. Feed the grammar machine with plot templates, he muses, and stories and books could be generated automatically, almost instantly. His boss, Mr Bohlen, is immediately enthusiastic, especially when Knipe tells him the rates magazines pay writers for short stories.
“This machine can produce a 5,000-word story, all typed and ready for dispatch, in thirty seconds,” Knipe tells him. “How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr Bohlen, how?”
I was reminded of The Great Automatic Grammatizator last week when I came across a piece in the publishing industry trade paper The Bookseller about a new venture aiming to publish 8,000 books next year. Not 8,000 copies of some carefully selected titles, 8,000 different books, with different covers and different content, almost all of them by different authors.
Not only that, but where most traditionally published books take anywhere from three months to a year or more between the submission of the manuscript and publication, due to a rigorous editorial and design process, these guys are promising to reduce that process to as little as two weeks.
What makes this even more remarkable is that according to the photograph accompanying the piece, the work will be done by four guys in their 20s with carefully manicured facial hair who all look as if they might have read a book once but probably didn’t finish it.
How, I wondered, has this quartet of central casting tech bros, pictured standing around awkwardly like four strangers arriving at a stag do before the groom and best man and trying to fill the silences with excruciating bantz, become the most remarkable operators in the history of publishing?
Well of course, they will not be doing the actual editing and proofing themselves, or indeed any of the actual book work at all, not in the meaningful sense of the word. No siree. These are ideas guys. Disruptors. Thinkers outside the proverbial cardboard container.
Not for them the hard graft of manuscript selection and laborious line-by-line analysis honed through years of experience. Pfft, that’s for losers. Instead they will be employing artificial intelligence to churn out a predicted 700 books a month throughout 2025.
Now, I should point out that, unlike the books produced by The Great Automatic Grammatizator, the projected 8,000 tomes will be written by actual humans. Humans who will have paid up to $5,000 to have their work edited and proofread by AI before having a cover designed by AI and then being lashed up on to global retail platforms before you can say, “hang on, that woman on the cover has three extra fingers and her head’s on backwards”.
While the thought of AI-generated stories doubtless has these lads drifting off into dreamy reveries between points in their games of pickleball, we’re not quite at that stage yet.
Mind you, AI-generated stories would not be stumping up five grand apiece to be published, which is why that particular business plan is currently consigned to the farther recesses of the ideas folder.
But that doesn’t prevent Spines – for this is the name of the venture – setting its sights high after reportedly securing $16m in investment, claiming already to have published 273 books in September this year alone.
“The goal is to help a million authors publish their books,” said Yehuda Niv, the venture’s chief executive and co-founder, adding that despite the authors paying Spines to have their books published in a process with absolutely no human interaction whatsoever, the company “isn’t self-publishing, is not a traditional publisher and is not a vanity publisher. We are a publishing platform. That’s a new concept”.
Like most of the ‘disruptive’ ideas devised by self-styled creatives, what Spines is doing is absolutely not a new concept. It is a very old concept, one almost as old as publishing itself. A vanity publisher is precisely what Spines is, an operation where people pay to publish their work with no constructive editorial input or marketing whatsoever, not to mention there being no financial risk to the publisher itself.
Vanity publishers, always regarded as the seedier end of an industry where reputable outfits do not charge authors money to produce their books, have been advertising in the back pages of literary periodicals for as long as there have been literary periodicals. Spines is firmly in that tradition, the artificial intelligence aspect merely a veneer to make the whole grubby process look modern and sophisticated.
The principle may be the same here, but we are a long way from the small ads. Instead there are slick social media videos in which the Spines dudes blabber dimwitted nonsense such as, “if you are just starting your writing journey you have to realise that you are on a journey”, and get the name of Barnes & Noble, one of the world’s biggest bookselling chains, wrong.
There is a website too, where you will find testimonials from satisfied customers including Carlos Andromeda, author of Biological Transcendence and the Tao, who chirrups, “I sent my book to 17 different publishers and got rejected every time, and vanity publishers quoted me between $11K-$17K. With Spines, I got my book published in less than 30 days!”
I looked up Biological Transcendence and the Tao and found it on Amazon, a 92-page booklet on sale for £14.93. Take that, traditional publishing!
Not only that, the publisher is listed as BooxAI, not Spines, and despite being published well over a year ago the book has garnered no customer reviews, no customer ratings, and does not appear to qualify for a place in the Amazon sales chart. Yet Mr Andromeda is delighted because despite being given the raspberry by every publisher he approached, with Spines his book was available in 30 days.
Bradley Matthews-Middleton, meanwhile, says: “My proofreading process used to take months, and I had to hire three freelancers. With Spines, I can do it in a single day”. Matthews-Middleton’s memoir, Road to Yesterday, is also listed on Amazon priced at £10.23 for just 44 pages.
Why a 44-page pamphlet would have necessitated the services of three separate freelance proofreaders isn’t explained, but Matthews-Middleton’s book does have a five-star customer review that declares it an “awesome read”.
The review is written by “Bradley Middleton”.
Now, I am absolutely not criticising the authors here. Carlos Andromeda tried 17 publishers before coming across Spines; he was clearly desperate to be published.
Bradley Matthews-Middleton’s blurb talks of “extending love beyond the hurt others have inflicted upon us”, suggesting that he has an altruistic, sharing motive to telling his story.
Every aspiring author dreams of seeing their words in print between the covers of a book they can hold in their hands and is prepared to do whatever feels necessary to achieve that. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of questionable advice available to aspiring writers, which is how some end up paying a significant sum of money to a website that actually boasts of the lack of human attention being paid to their work.
Vanity publishing is not a scam. Authors know exactly what they’re getting for their money, and if you’re just after a small run of your book to distribute among family and friends, it can work. It is not a path to a bestseller, however.
But then, Spines are not interested in publishing bestsellers. Indeed, they are not even interested in literary worth or quality. Their priorities lie elsewhere.
Look again at those testimonials above. Each one grandstands something that is fundamentally a bad thing for the creation of good-quality literature.
Carlos Andromeda gushes about his work being published inside 30 days. Bradley Matthews-Middleton turned around his proofreading in “a single day”. Another author, whose 96-page self-help book is on sale for a whopping £23.32, beams that her book cover took three minutes to design.
How on earth are these positives? How is such an obviously slapdash approach benefitting either the author or the wider world of books?
One testimonial even complained that before throwing in his literary lot with Spines the author had paid $3,500 to editors but “felt they had changed my book”. That is exactly what editors are for. They change things. They make them better. They know what makes a book good. What did he think he was paying them to do?
The Spines business model, which values speed and quantity above all other considerations, has been created by nitwits who have echoing chasms where their souls should be.
Their vacuous pronouncements about wanting to “bring books to the masses” (because “the masses” had no idea where to find a book until these dudes came along) as part of an authorial “self-branding process” (to be honest I would rather sear my initials into my own flesh with a red-hot iron than publish anything with these people) tell you that we are not exactly dealing with thinkers here.
Perhaps that’s why they love AI so much, an entire technology based on the absence of thinking. That philosophy might work in a lot of other economic sectors, but thinking is the creative process, thinking is what makes books. Thinking is what has made humans creatively exceptional ever since we started spitting colours on to cave walls to leave an outline of our hands.
Of course AI has its uses, but its best uses are to take away the tasks of everyday drudgery, leaving us more time to create things, not replace those things with something far, far worse.
AI is creeping into the world of books; only last week a publisher wrote to me delighted that one of my books had been selected to be sold to a big US tech firm to be mined for their language learning models.
I think they expected me to be thrilled by this, but even though there was a fee involved I could not say no quickly enough. Why would I want to feed work I had created into a system designed to be detrimental to the craft of authorship which, like Spines, will only end up drowning the world in AI slop?
We are hurtling towards the kind of literary world envisioned by Adolph Knipe in Dahl’s story.
“The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter,” Knipe said. “It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods.”
