Comment by rasengan0
1 day ago
>"All of our future books will involve AI." >It is antithetical to the premise of the book (classic programming projects!) that they agreed to publish.
I hope this trend is not industry wide. A publisher chasing fads and trends over enduring quality, so sad. I wish I knew who the publisher was to avoid but I can foresee their pivot to AI authors with titles like "From Zero to Hero, ChatGPT 5.2 Top Prompting Secrets for Dummies"
Technical books don't sell well to begin with. I've written a couple w/ a major publisher, it never paid back the RAM I needed to purchase to run the lab environment.
Publishers are going to demand chasing the hot-new-thing which will most likely be irrelevant by the time the book is on the shelf.
"How to write x86 ASM... with the Copilot Desktop app! - Build your bootloader in 15 seconds!"
The article hints at this, but publishers live on the outsize success of very few of their books, and the rest of them are losses.
It's exactly the sort of financial pressure that will make them chase fads and trends, and it gets worse in difficult economic times.
>publishers live on the outsize success of very few of their books, and the rest of them are losses.
That is true of many industries, including films, vc software startups, games and books. As the Internet increases competition and opportunity, it is likely to become more true.
You won't believe how bad things are where I live. We have a government-subsidized AI image generation course here.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439143
Industry-wide? Looks damn near pan-industry to me
And most normal people are fed up with it. Nobody understands why most of their apps suddenly have chatbots in them now.
When a company whose services I use announces that they're adding AI to them, my first response is always to wonder how I can turn it off.
1 reply →
I can't detail it much further than just this, but I understand that Tim O'Reilly has the AI virus bad and makes his reports tell him what they've done with AI that day every day. So I've got a first guess.
I’ve never worked in technical publishing but I have a few acquaintances who do. Adding chapters on AI is pretty close to industry wide for new writers. Experienced writers with sales figures have a lot more freedom.
The thing is, it’s not about getting chapters published on AI. The publishers are keenly aware that AI is using their content to steal their market and so anything they publish on AI will be obsolete before the final manuscript is published. It’s about getting potentially difficult first time authors to quit before their first third gets approved - that’s when the author is owed their first advance.
It’s a lot easier to slaughter sheep if the most docile select themselves.