I think about this conversation with John Thelin, who described this moment as a sort of inverse New Deal, a lot: “We’re talking about the character and essence of our universities for at least the next generation.”

Too soon to say. Do we really have a choice?

For profs like me, it's a totally different calculation than for your books, though, Charles. We will have an initial boom of sales to libraries in the first year or two and sell at very low levels after that. In financial terms, our benefits come through promotion and tenure raises.

Makes sense. The accompanying letter states that YUP will not offer the title for AI licensing unless I agree to the contract amendment. It also mentions the Anthropic settlement, which seems to me to be about theft rather than IP rights per se, and claims signing the amendment won't affect that.

As a wild guestimate,
@yalepress
publishes abut 250 books/year, and its backlist might be around 1 million titles. If it sells AI rights to it for $100 million each to five AI companies, that's sales of $500 million. At 25%, authors would get $125 per title. At 75%, $375.

Unlike royalties, with better selling titles making more, AI licensing seems to be done in bulk and for a one-time fee. As far as I know, there is no way to parse the value to the training of a particular title or track its usage in the AI outputs. Pls inform if that's wrong.

We're probably talking about the usual peanuts for authors no matter what the percentage is. Presses are looking at their backlists and see a way to make millions by selling to a market that did not even exist a few years ago.

Here is the link to my article that I uploaded to NotebookLM to generate the video: doi.org/10.1080/0144...

Here is the link to my article that I uploaded to NotebookLM: journals.openedition.org/slaveries/3358

Here is the storymap link: Slavery and the University at storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7dec...