Your Research Was Sold to Train AI. Nobody Asked You.

Your research was sold to train AI

Introduction For decades, academic publishing operated on a quiet social contract. Researchers conducted studies, wrote papers, submitted them to journals, and in return received something that was rarely financial but often professionally invaluable: visibility, prestige, citations, career advancement, and a place in the scholarly record. Publishers, meanwhile, handled the infrastructure of dissemination, archiving, editorial management, … Read more

Publishing in the Age of AI Capitalism

Publishing in the age of AI capitalism

Introduction: AI Did Not Enter Publishing as a Neutral Tool Artificial intelligence has arrived in publishing wrapped in the language of efficiency. Industry conferences celebrate faster editorial workflows, smarter metadata generation, automated marketing copy, cheaper audiobook production, and AI-assisted manuscript review. On the surface, it all sounds like a productivity revolution, another technological upgrade in … Read more

Audiobooks Are Getting Cheaper to Produce and Harder to Monetize

Audiobooks are getting cheaper to produce

Introduction For most of its modern history, the audiobook market has been defined by constraint. It was expensive to produce, slow to scale, and limited in reach. Recording a single title required professional voice actors, studio time, sound engineers, post-production editing, and distribution logistics that were far from trivial. Even large publishers had to be … Read more

Publishing Is Becoming Infrastructure, Not Industry

Publishing is becoming infrastructure

Introduction: The Industry That Quietly Disappeared For most of modern history, publishing was easy to define. It was an industry built around producing books, printing them, distributing them, and ultimately selling them. Everything else, from marketing to editorial positioning, existed to support that core function. Control the pipeline, and you controlled the industry. That model … Read more

Southeast Asia Is No Longer a Publishing Market. It’s a Power Center.

Southeast Asia is no longer a publishing market

The Industry Is Looking in the Wrong Direction For decades, global publishing has operated with a quiet assumption. The industry’s center of gravity sits firmly in the West, anchored in New York, London, and a handful of European capitals. Everything else exists somewhere along a spectrum of “emerging markets,” places to expand into, not places … Read more