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Let Him Book
A startup called Spines apparently wants to use AI to edit and publish 8,000 books in 2025 — though no word on whether they'll be any good.
There are several issues with the premise. First, AI is a notoriously untalented wordsmith. It will undoubtedly struggle with the myriad tasks Spines assigns to it, including "proofreads, cover designs, formats, publishes, and... distributing your book in just a couple of weeks," according to the venture's website.
Oh, and then there's the issue of Spines embarrassing itself publicly.
"A great example of how no one can find actual uses for LLMs that aren't scams for grifts," short story writer Lincoln Michel wrote of the flap on X-formerly-Twitter. "Quite literally the LAST thing publishing needs is... AI regurgitations."
Author Rowan Coleman agreed.
"The people behind Spines AI publishing are spineLESS," Coleman posted on the same site. "They don’t care about books, don’t care about art, don’t care about the instinctive human talent it takes to write, edit and produce a book. They want the magic, without the work."
Feral Page
Spines CEO and cofounder Yehuda Niv told The Bookseller, a UK book business magazine, that Spines had already published seven "bestsellers." But when Spines was pressed to provide sales numbers, a company representative claimed the "data is private and belongs to the author." Hm, suspicious.
Niv also promised The Bookseller that Spines "isn't self-publishing, is not a traditional publisher and is not a vanity publisher." That's despite the fact that Spines' website, which sells publishing plans from between $1,500 to $4,400, advertises to customers who are clearly looking to team up with an inexpensive vanity publisher.
"I sent my book to 17 different publishers and got rejected every time, and vanity publishers quoted me between $11,000 to $17,000," said on Spines' website the author of Spines' "Biological Transcendence and the Tao: An Exposé on the Potential to Alleviate Disease and Ageing and the Considerations of Age-Old Wisdom," which doesn't currently have a single Amazon review. "With Spines, I got my book published in less than 30 days!"
Hm, interesting. That testimonial makes Spines sound an awful lot like a vanity publisher.
AI startups love to reinvent the wheel and claim it's never been done before. Like an ed tech startup founder who used AI to cover for her run-of-the-mill embezzlement, or a Finnish AI company which put a high tech twist on the common practice of exploiting incarcerated workers.
Will it work for books? We'll be watching.
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