When the standard for success is "disrupting," you can just ruin stuff and feel like a winner.

A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the book industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business that—for a fee—offers the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish, and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.

Spines was supposed to be a revolutionary company within the publishing industry. Instead, its leadership was overpromised by leagues and may have resorted to dirty tricks to cover up their mistakes.

If you've any interest in books or publishing, then you need to read this article, because this is the business model for 'AI' publishing laid out in full by people who are doing it, and it's a fucking nightmare.

First, let me say that this photo is a perfect representation of four tech bros as an 'AI' image. The same character with slight variations of clothes and facial hair. They want to publish 8,000 books next year. With those numbers, there will be no quality control.

But then quality is not their goal; it's all about being paid a fee per 'publication'. That's a self-publishing service, and these exist already, of course, but these guys claim to be doing something different. 'We are a publishing platform. That’s a new concept.'

Typical tech bros, thinking they've come up with a new idea because they've only just thought of it themselves. All they're doing is introducing more automation into the process. Will they be providing a means of marketing or distribution to compete with Amazon or Ingram Micro?

No, what they'll provide is a means to create an ever-increasing flood of 'content' into a book distribution system that has already become a swamp. It doesn't matter to them who they're serving or the quality they're producing.

To every traditional publisher who thinks they now have to invest in 'AI' because the technology is 'inevitable', they need to realise that this is the only thing that's inevitable about it—that it will reduce the value—financial, artistic, and societal—of published books.

If you're running a restaurant, investing in pigs' troughs is not a business plan; it's professional suicide. Guys like this have no interest in publishing. They are not an example to follow. They are the perfect example of what the publishing industry does not want to be.

Also, it's a great example of how no one can find actual uses for LLMs that aren't scams for grifts. Quite literally, the LAST thing publishing needs is MORE manuscripts, especially low-quality and unedited AI regurgitations. This isn't a problem being solved.

Publishing publishes more books than readers can support (before even getting into self-publishing), and there are huge numbers of unpublished manuscripts of equal quality.

Find an AI that will get more people purchasing books. Anything else is grifting.

My problem also with the Spines AI debate is that the company believes it can charge $5,000 to an author for editing their book and designing a cover, while they will use AI to do it for free. Plus, if there's money in this, Amazon will do it cheaper and better. They're just using AI tools to make the process of fleecing would-be authors more profitable.

They are not "publishers" but a "publishing services" company, & the difference matters. You can't use AI to do literary or academic copy-, line-, & developmental editing. Literally requires super-talented humans. Total predators. It makes me sick. And of course they’re grifting AI audiobook narrations too. SIXTEEN fucking million dollars. It’s obscene.

Writers also condemn startup’s plans to publish 8,000 books next year using AI Publisher Spines will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited and distributed with the help of artificial intelligence.

The new vanity AI publisher, "Spines," is a terrible idea on many levels, but not "three weeks is too fast." Publishers aren't engineered for speed, but other high-quality, non-AI organisations are (e.g., newspapers, the New Yorker, the Economist, etc.). Speed isn't the issue.

This one is especially scammy, as it's a vanity press that charges $5,000 for "the use of AI to proofread, produce, and publish" a book. Pretty sure you could do that a lot cheaper elsewhere.