On Nov. 18, 2022, PW published a report analyzing a database of 1,300 publishing startups, almost all of which were founded since Amazon launched the Kindle some fifteen years earlier. As soon as it was published, it was out-of-date: two days later, on Nov. 20, 2022, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT, and since then the number of new startups has exploded.

“Over the past two years we’ve seen the launch of approximately 320 startups, nearly all AI-related,” Thad McIlroy, the industry consultant and PW contributor who maintains the database, says. As of October, the database now includes 1,763 companies, of which 1,183 are still operating and 580 have closed.

PW’s database doesn’t include other companies’ proprietary, internal AI operations. It is widely believed that each of the Big Five publishers has internal AI projects discreetly hidden from view.

Why? Because while publishers are employing AI internally to streamline their businesses—and who wouldn’t, the tools are powerful—they are also suing the LLMs for copyright infringement, as it has become public knowledge that OpenAI and others used published books without permission to train their models. It is widely felt that a new model for licensing published content to AI companies and ensuring publishers are compensated must be implemented.

OpenAI’s appetite for professionally produced words has paid off: as of the start of October, the company was valued at $157 billion, roughly the same revenue generated by the global book publishing industry in one year. OpenAI is projecting $3.7 billion in sales this year, growing closer each day to the $4.92 billion Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade publisher, earned in 2023.

Still, this is a false equivalency: revenue from AI still has the potential to grow exponentially. Book publishing, at least in its print form, does not.

Audiobooks, however, still have massive room for growth. As seen at this September’s inaugural International Summit of Audio Publishers, audiobook innovation is ongoing, much of it driven by—surprise!—Sweden, where in 2023, 64% of all books sold were in the audiobook format, according to industry consultant Carlo Carrenho.

Among Swedish companies, there is no bigger player than Spotify, which entered the English-language audiobook market in October 2023. The service has proven extremely popular. Robert Thomson, CEO of HarperCollins’s parent company News Corp, has repeatedly called Spotify a “game changer” for the audiobook market, citing double-digit sales growth for audiobooks at his company as a result. Spotify is having an impact on self-published authors too, with users of Spotify’s Findaway Voices service for indie creators having seen their royalties nearly double. Furthermore, Spotify—like another tech behemoth, TikTok—is drawing in younger audiences. It too is employing AI, in this case to predict books a user might like according to their musical listening habits in order to promote them alongside their playlists.

But Spotify isn’t the only Swedish innovator: Storytel has introduced an AI-powered “voice switcher” that allows a user to switch narrators for an audiobook on the fly, and Nuanxed is using AI to expedite literary translation, delivering books in weeks, not years. Both services are using AI to do jobs that would normally be done by human workers, but each company argues that it will ultimately serve to grow the market, thus creating more, not fewer, opportunities for narrators and translators.

Whether that’s the case remains to be seen. One thing that does appear certain is that AI is giving publishers tools to more cost-effectively publish and translate books that might not otherwise have been profitable. Who will ultimately benefit from those profits—the people who contributed to the book’s success or some amorphous group of faceless shareholders—is ultimately up to management.

One thing is certain: while any financial impact changes wrought by AI on publishing will be marginal compared with AI’s overall impact on the global economy, the ultimate value of what publishing facilitates—whether print or digital—remains ineffable and unquantifiable.

A version of this article originally appeared in the 2024 PW Frankfurt Book Fair digital supplement.