Writers and publishers are criticising a startup that plans to publish up to 8,000 books next year using AI.
The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI.
Independent publisher Canongate said “these dingbats … don’t care about writing or books”, in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging “hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft”.
“These aren’t people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related,” said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. “These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.”
Spines – which secured $16m in a recent funding round – says that authors will retain 100% of their royalties. Co-founder Yehuda Niv, who previously ran a publisher and publishing services business in Israel, claimed that the company “isn’t self-publishing” or a vanity publisher but a “publishing platform”.
“Regardless of how they present their platform they ARE a vanity publisher,” wrote Deidre J Owen, co-founder of “independent micropublisher” Mannison Press, in a post on X.
The company is seemingly “just trying to speed up” self-publishing “in a way that won’t work well, and of course, they don’t want to call it that”, said Marco Rinaldi, co-host of Page One – The Writer’s Podcast, in a post on Bluesky.
“We would warn authors to think extremely carefully before committing to any author-contribute contract” involving a writer paying for their work to be published, said Anna Ganley, chief executive of the UK’s largest trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, the Society of Authors.
“It is very unlikely to deliver on what an author is hoping they might achieve, it is most unlikely to be their best route to publication, and if it also relies on AI systems there are concerns about the lack of originality and quality of the service being offered – even if there are guarantees (which we suspect are unlikely) that the AI system in question was not developed by using unlawfully scraped copyright content,” she added.
Spines says it will reduce the time it takes to publish a book to two to three weeks. Last week, Microsoft announced it is launching a book imprint which likewise aims to print books faster than traditional publishers. Earlier this month, it was revealed that HarperCollins had reached an agreement with Microsoft to allow some of its titles to be used to train AI models, with the permission of authors.
“Our goal is to empower authors”, a representative from Spines told the Guardian. “Without Spines, an aspiring author usually approaches a publishing agency when 99% of authors are refused, as they are not celebrities or connected to the right people.
“Those disappointed authors can turn to vanity publishing and pay between $10,000 and $50,000 for a single book, or go the route of self-publishing which requires their expertise in each task such as designing the cover, marketing the book and on and on. This process can take between 6 and 18 months. Using technology, Spines streamlines the process of publishing a book, allowing the authors to focus on what they do best: write great stories.”
Spines is “levelling the playing field for any person who aspires to be an author to get published within less than three weeks and at a fraction of the cost. Our goal is to help 1 million authors to publish their books using technology,” the representative added.
• This article was amended on 27 November 2024 to include a response from Spines that was received after publication. A reference to the company raising $16m in “seed funding” was corrected; that sum was raised in a subsequent funding round. The subheading of an earlier version said books would be “edited” with the help of AI; Spines’ software offers options to revise the style and length of a manuscript using AI, but the company told the Guardian that “if an author would like to undergo an editing process with Spines, it would be done solely by a human editor”.
