Writers condemn startup’s plans to publish 8,000 books next year using AI | Books

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 recently secured $16m in seed funding, according to a profile of the company in the Bookseller – 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.

A representative from Spines has been approached for comment.