Feature image: A Kyoto bookshop. Supplied

“I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am.”

How things have changed in the world of reading and writing and books since Walter Benjamin wrote those words back in 1931. Today, I’m unpacking my own library. How things have changed even in the few short years since I originally consigned its contents to the storage facility down the road.

Now, I mostly read from an app on my phone. Or listen to an audiobook as I’m doing the household chores. If it’s a research paper or lengthy report, I get Google Notebook LM to summarise the contents for me, either as a briefing note, a mind map or an AI-generated podcast with two chatty hosts.  Unboxing these exquisite hardcover volumes has acquired the romance of unpacking artefacts from some archaeological dig. They are familiar yet foreign.

As for my own writing, I research by uploading multiple PDFs to NotebookLM and use Perplexity Pro to research a topic for me online – all its answers have citations and links to sources and so can be checked for accuracy or veracity as needed.

One thing I won’t do is use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or any of those shiny, miraculous new tools the wordsmith has at her or his disposal to write for me. Yes, I write for money – for as Samuel Johnson said, “Nobody but a blockhead would write except for money.”

But whether it’s a review, an essay, a short story, or a poem, I also write for pleasure. To hone my technical, rhetorical and critical thinking skills. To enhance my memory and my knowledge of the world and the beings I share with it. To enlarge my consciousness.

To outsource to AI any of the processes which make us human seems to me the height of folly. Here’s Meghan O’Rourke in the New York Times:

“Will the wide-scale adoption of AI produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we’ve become more and more capable.

“What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.”

And yet the pressure for stressed-out students or authors trying to make a fulltime living, the temptation to scale up and simply get AI to write the stuff for you is enormous. For too many writers, the bottom line is the breadline. Most cannot earn a decent living from plying their trade. Here in Australia, fulltime authors focussing on traditional publishing can expect to earn an average of $18,200 per annum (the picture for self-published authors, of which more anon, is only slightly better). These days, even garrets are becoming less affordable.

The sad truth is that the output and its attendant rewards may far outweigh the benefits of doing the work yourself. In these circumstances, self-development seems a quaint, outmoded concept. Productivity wins. We’re outsourcing our humanity.

The trick is to make AI a genuine collaborator rather than a mere tool. To assist me with all those benefits that derive from doing the work, which I listed above. That’s why I’m AI agnostic rather than AI sceptical. I resist aligning myself with any one tool or workflow. I reject simplistic binary thinking. I certainly refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s just too much to gain.

As Perth author Sara Foster says, “AI could be of real benefit to authors who are trying to manage so many different facets of author life – it could be a great prompt for business and campaign planning, or writing promotional material, or looking for places to advertise or reach out.”

But Sara is wary of generative AI. “I feel that this could lead to quite a bit of sloppy storytelling of poorer, more generic quality, and dilute writers’ innovation and critical thinking.” Still, she adds, “AI might just propel us towards a deeper valuing of human, authentic connections, although I suspect we could be in for a bit of a rollercoaster in the short term while everyone grapples with what it means for our art and culture.”

There are legitimate causes for worry – the hefty environmental impact of the required computing power for AI is one – but of especial concern for authors is the unauthorised use of IP for training large language models (LLMs). Writers must be adequately recompensed by companies who “steal” their work for such training. The Australian Society of Authors is very clear on this point:

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities and efficiencies but also poses significant risks to the creative industries. It is imperative that the development and use of generative AI is carefully regulated. The rights of human creators must be safeguarded and their contributions to the development of AI technologies acknowledged and compensated.”

Many authors recognise this while still availing themselves of tools that may indeed rely on such training. They might use AI as part of their workflow to brainstorm, outline, research, draft, revise or simply speed up tedious admin tasks.

The less scrupulous undoubtedly flood the market with AI-generated slop. Most of us can spot it a mile off. However many readers can’t. Caveat emptor. To combat this, regulations and even disclosure clauses in publisher contracts are becoming more prevalent.

Does all the above sound familiar? Have we been here before? Every change – technological, social, cultural, economic, political or otherwise – can make us feel like we’re in the midst of something new and unprecedented. AI is just the latest so-called disruptor. That’s also why authors are taking matters into their own hands in other ways, looking for alternative routes to publishing, many of which modern technology has made possible.

To provide some context around these new paths to publication, a short history lesson seems in order. Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press (c.1440) lobbed a hand grenade into the medieval scriptorium. Suddenly scribes found their livelihoods threatened by the new technology. It didn’t happen overnight – demand for lavish illuminated books, essentially hybrid publications in which the printed word sat side by side with calligraphy capitals and hand-coloured illustrations continued for some time – but the writing was, so to speak, on the wall. An information revolution was underway. Never had books been so quickly and cheaply available to so many.

The following centuries saw the splitting of printing, publishing and bookselling into separate businesses (this is when famous publishing houses such as Wiley and Harper & Brothers first appeared), the establishment of copyright law and the royalty system, and increased global distribution made possible by steam powered trains and ships. In the 20th century, the “paperback revolution” spearheaded by Penguin, digital innovations such as Project Gutenberg, desktop publishing software and the proliferations of eBooks via the World Wide Web, set us up for the big 21st century showdowns between writers, readers, publishers and retailers. And the transition from manageable scarcity to volatile abundance.

It’s not a question of supply and demand. It’s a question of adequately recognising the value of cultural output. Like it or not, a book is a commodity in a sector dominated by Amazon and others who leverage their dominance in order to increase profits at the expense of authors. Cheap, and in some cases free, books only encourage readers to devalue the product and the labour that goes into it even more. It’s a vicious cycle.

Meanwhile, traditional publishers of physical books have their own problems. Slender profit margins, the impact of self-publishing, small ROIs, the environmental impact of production and distribution, the increasing appetite for eBooks and audiobooks purchased online and less appetite for risk are seeing their former power and influence being eroded day by day. No wonder authors are seeking those alternative pathways to publishing.

Alternatives such as self-publishing, which relies on platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, Apple Books, self-publishing services like Book Reality and technologies such as desktop and print-on-demand publishing. Smaller independent publishers including WA’s Upswell and Night Parrot Press. Subscription platforms such as Substack and Patreon.

Most intriguingly perhaps is not-for-profit Australian startup Fableration, which aims to replace the “brokenomics” of book publishing with an “equinomity” model by leveraging ethical AI and blockchain technology while busting out of the heavily weighted algorithmic “fog” by enhancing discoverability.

Ultimately, the author’s best friend is genuine community-building. Authenticity, like intelligence, is easy to mimic online. But get an author in front of a crowd for an in-conversation and reading in a bookshop, library or at a literary festival – that’s where the rubber hits the road. Not to mention a slam poetry gig like the one I recently attended. There’s nowhere to hide. You’re in dialogue, in conversation, with your readers and listeners. It’s dynamic, it’s unpredictable, it’s risky, it’s exhilarating.

I’ve missed my physical books. But I’ve no room for them in our small apartment. Most of them will be donated to the Save the Children UWA Winter Book Sale. They’ll find a loving home. And who knows: perhaps someone, somewhere, will read my marginalia and enter into a ghostly conversation not just with the author but with me, the previous owner of the book.

Now that’s the kind of virtual engagement I like.