Side Note: Credentials for Writing This Book

I didn’t want to burden the introduction with this information, but I know that people are skeptical of the folks writing about AI today, suspicious that many of these authors are fashioning themselves as latter-day AI experts. No doubt some are. I hope that I have acceptable credentials to undertake this project.

I read my first book about artificial intelligence in 1988, a book published two years previously, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. The book is dense—much of it was beyond my understanding—but it was the first time I got excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence in book publishing.

By that time I was deep into the weeds of the digitization of publishing, occasioned by the explosion of desktop publishing, Apple computers, PageMaker and the like. I continued to work in publishing technology, as a consultant and analyst, working with some of the leading software and hardware vendors, including Adobe, Apple and Microsoft. I also became involved with, and a part-owner, of a software company called Enfocus. We created an automated system for prepress workflows.

We didn’t have access to AI at that juncture, but we got very good at unleashing fully automated publishing production systems. As AI can be indistinguishable from magic, so too can the best of automation appear to resemble AI.

Fast forward to 2016, and my colleague Cliff Guren helped me focus on AI in book publishing: it was beginning to look like something was finally happening. The Bestseller Code (Archer and Jockers) appeared in September, 2016, making it clear that computers could interpret the texture of literature with a high degree of insight and precision.

By that time I was paying close attention to book publishing startups, and a small number emerged with some degree of AI technology wound into their software offerings.

Fast forward again, to October 2022.

A month before the release of ChatGPT, and several months before Chat AI became the topic everyone in publishing was talking about, Tim O’Reilly presented to the PageBreak Conference on “AI and Publishing Transformation.” O’Reilly is well-known in the publishing community, both for O’Reilly Media and for the Tools of Change conference. He’s one of tech’s top visionaries.

O’Reilly was not merely enthusiastic about the new advances in AI, he was over the top. “We’re at a point that’s very similar to how I felt when we discovered the Worldwide Web in 1992,” he said, and followed that with “this is as transformative as VisiCalc, the PC, and the web browser.”

He admitted that the use case was still fuzzy, pointing to a couple of pilot projects at O’Reilly Media. But, he said, “this is getting better scarily fast. Machine learning is not a future thing anymore. This is about the democratization of AI.”

O’Reilly talked about how publishers should approach these new technologies, saying that they need to “know when to burn the boats and go all in. There’s a time when you have to commit.”

PageBreak was the first publishing conference to put AI front and center, via Tim’s insights.

This book has five sponsors. I knew when writing the book that there would be few riches to be found, and I decided to underwrite my efforts by inviting sponsors to participate.

As I indicate on my website, working as a consultant, an analyst, and as a journalist, I support the International Federation of Journalists’ Global Charter of Ethics for Journalists. Paragraph 13 is clear on the obligation to avoid conflicts of interest or “any confusion between (my) activity and that of advertising or propaganda.”

Having sponsors suggests a conflict of interest and a confusion around advertising. If I was working for the New York Times it would be simple: “No.” Working for myself, disclosure is my weapon to satisfy these obligations: I’ll describe the consideration I’ve received and you can judge, in my work, if I have been compromised.

I chose the sponsors that I invited to this project because I was familiar not only with their work but with the individuals involved in their organizations. They include colleagues and friends. I told them that their products might be discussed in the text of this book and they would have no control over those words. What they could control was their advertisements at the end of the book—I would post those as supplied. That’s what I’ve done.

I have received payments from others that may have influenced my work on this book—I can catalog the following:

• I have not done any paid consulting work for the AI vendors described in this book, including the sponsors.

• I received some profit-sharing revenue from Publishers Weekly for the AI webinars in September, 2023 and from BISG for our monthly webinar series.

• I’m paid a standard per word rate for my Publishers Weekly articles.

Please let me know if you detect any favoritism that you think may have resulted from these engagements. My broad bias in favor of AI was formed early.