Microsoft to pay some publishers for content used by AI agents

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Microsoft to pay some publishers for content used by AI agents

27 September 2025

Microsoft is reportedly discussing with select US publishers a pilot program for its so-called Publisher Content Marketplace, a system that pays publishers for their content when it gets used by AI products, starting with its own Copilot assistant.

It’s a step in the right direction, but a lot hangs on the word select. The suggestion here is the majority of publishers, particularly smaller ones, including bloggers, will be excluded. Even if their content has been scrapped, and is being used in AI products.

Reasons to leave Substack, how to leave Substack

5 August 2025

The question is — before giving any thought to some of the objectionable content they host — what are you doing there in the first place? Why would you allow your brand to be assimilated by another?

American economist Paul Krugman’s decision to set up shop on Substack, after he stopped writing for The New York Times, plain baffles me. With a profile as impressive as his, Krugman could just as easily started publishing from his own website, with a ready made audience.

He didn’t need to go to a third party publishing platform. Certainly Substack publishes writer’s posts as email newsletters, but if someone wants to syndicate their work by newsletter, there are other options. Writers can earn money through Substack, some do very well apparently, but high profile writers have a number of ways of generating revenue through their own, self-hosted, websites.

You Should Probably Leave Substack goes through some of the options available to writers who want to leave Substack (and preferably publish from their own website).

12 foot ladder, a website that circumvented paywalls, taken offline

19 July 2025

Emma Roth, writing for The Verge:

The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has “successfully secured” the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online.

Thomas Millar, the 12 Foot Ladder founder, saw his app as a way of “cleaning” web pages, by disabling scripts that blocked access to non-paying subscribers. The News/Media Alliance, on the other hand, viewed 12 Foot as an illegal tool, that deprived publishers and writers of subscription income.

The near demise, and comeback, of Medium, an online publishing platform

17 July 2025

Tony Stubblebine, CEO of online publishing platform Medium, writing at Medium:

I’m gonna write the wonky post of Medium’s turnaround. I’m not sure if a company is allowed to be this blunt about how bad things were. But it’s very much of the Medium ethos that if something interesting happened to you, then you should write it up and share it. So hopefully this will give some inside info about what happens to a startup in distress, and one way to approach a financial, brand, product, and community turnaround.

Like many online writers I signed up for Medium — which is similar to Substack — a couple of years after its 2012 founding. A few people I knew were publishing there, and I was curious to see what it was about. I’m yet to post anything though.

But Stubblebine’s account of Medium’s ups and downs is, at times, astonishing. Particularly the amounts of money, both as investments, and in debt, that are involved. Of course, there will be plenty of people who’ll call those sums a pittance, but speaking as a boot-strapping independent online publisher, they are incredible.

The lure of publishing your work on a platform such as Medium, lies in the opportunity to be paid for it. And no doubt, some writers posting on Medium do well.

For my part, the prospect of publishing there (or on similar platforms) is tempting, but doing so just isn’t in my DNA. I’ve never liked the idea of assimilating my brand into someone else’s, something I’ve said before. Anything you do on a third-party publishing platform is doable on your own website/blog, if you are prepared to persevere.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t ever post there, and for someone like me, a platform such as Medium might be comparable to a social media channel.

Limit AI use Colleen Hoover, Dennis Lehane, others, ask book publishers

10 July 2025

Colleen Hoover and Dennis Lehane are among American authors who have signed an open letter to book publishers including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Hachette, asking them to extensively limit their use of AI. The authors are requesting no AI generated work be published, and publishing company staff are not replaced, either partly or wholly, by AI technologies.

The authors demands are reasonable, to a degree. Any AI created works of fiction will most certainly contain the literary DNA of previously published writers, given the quantity of novels that have been used to train AI models. I believe though reputable publishers would think twice about publishing books one-hundred percent generated by AI. But I’m not sure the authors’ expectations that the roles of employees be guaranteed is realistic, well intentioned as it is.

AI is here to stay. Attempting to create AI-free sanctuaries in workplaces is pointless. AI will impact on everyone’s work one way or another. What we need to do is adapt. The matter that really needs to be addressed, is the issue of writers’ works being used to train chatbots without permission or recompense. Maybe the letter will draw further attention to this problem.

disassociated is listed in the Internet Phone Book: call me on 492

19 May 2025

A colorful drawing activity is taking place on a table with a yellow book titled

Image courtesy of Ana Šantl.

disassociated has been included in the inaugural edition of the Internet Phone Book, a directory of over seven-hundred personal websites and blogs, compiled by Kristoffer Tjalve, and Elliott Cost.

An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.

You don’t read a great deal of poetry on my website, but Tjalve and Cost offer a definition of poetic in this interview with Meg Miller of Are.na, publishers of the book.

Being a phone directory, each listed website naturally comes with a “phone number”, a three digit code allocated by the authors, a kind of short-cut link, that lets you “call” through, I’m on 492.

As of the time I type, the book has sold out through the publisher’s website (I think another print is in the works), though it is available from selected stockists across Europe, and in South Korea.

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blogs, books, publishing

Book publisher Simon & Schuster says no to celebrity blurbs

17 February 2025

Lucy Knight, writing for The Guardian:

[] soon we may not see so many of these author blurbs — Sean Manning, publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint in the US, has written an essay for Publishers Weekly explaining that as of this year he will “no longer require authors to obtain blurbs for their books”.

A celebrity blurb is where a well known author offers some brief praise for the work of a new, or not so well known, writer. Examples could be something like: “a veritable page-turner”, or “a forceful new talent”. But it’s not always clear whether the author offering the endorsement has even read the book in question. That’s one reason why I take a dim view of celebrity blurbs.

I’m more interested in a novel’s synopsis, and then — where possible — seeking out some consensus as to whether the book is good or bad, through a website like Hardcover. After all, life is too short to spend reading novels you might not like.

But what surprises, and irks me, is that blurb is an official book publishing term. It sounds like a colloquialism, which it very much is, but it seems like a word people use because they don’t know the correct term to use. Sarney is a colloquialism, but sandwich is what is meant.

Wikipedia defines a blurb as a “a short promotional piece“, and celebrity endorsements aside, are usually more a short, yet enticing, summary of a novel. Here is the publisher’s blurb for Christian White’s most recent novel, The Ledge, which I wrote about last week:

When human remains are discovered in a forest, police are baffled, the locals are shocked and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered. It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, drawing his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed. In The Ledge, past and present run breathlessly parallel, leading to a climax that will change everything you thought you knew. This is a mind-bending new novel from the master of the unexpected.

That’s more like a synopsis, or even a summary, albeit with a promotional bent. Films are marketed with a similar sort of write-up, but synopsis is usually the go-to term, even though people sometimes call them blurbs. But blurb sounds like the sort of word I might otherwise be, maybe with some trepidation, looking up on Urban Dictionary.

Henceforth, I shall do away with the blubbery blurb, and go with synopsis or summary.

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books, language, novels, publishing

Text publishing bought by Penguin Random House. Exciting, right?

29 January 2025

Independent Melbourne based Australian book publisher Text Publishing was recently acquired by Penguin Random House Australia, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House (PRH), one of the world’s largest publishers. While the move has been hailed as “exciting” by Text and PRH, some literary commentators do not feel the same way.

Both parties say they are committed to retaining Text’s independence as a PRH imprint, but this isn’t always the long term outcome, says Misha Ketchell, writing for The Conversation:

But history shows that mergers often result in the dissolution of the smaller imprint. To take just one example, Penguin no longer publishes books under the McPhee Gribble imprint. It is precisely the question of which readerships the merged version of Text will cater to that will worry Australian readers and supporters of independent publishing.

Text obviously have their reasons for making the deal, and their independence as a PRH imprint appears to be hard wired into the acquisition agreement. Those concerned about the future of independent book publishing in Australia have reason to be fearful though. Text joins other previously standalone local publishing houses, Affirm Press, and Pantera Press, in being bought out by larger book publishers in 2024. Australia is running low on indie publishers.

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Australia, books, publishing

Rambles.NET, a webzine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999

6 January 2025

Rambles.NET is an online magazine founded by Tom Knapp in 1999, and still going strong over twenty-five later. Knapp himself continues to contribute. Rambles is another example of Indie Web in its original inception; I think a Facebook page is the only hint of social media present.

I had a crack at publishing a webzine way back in the day, something called channel static (Internet Archive link). Notice my ever-present use of lower case styling for proper website names.

Like all good webzines of the day (and today), Rambles published articles on a wide range of topics, including music, film, literature, pop culture, nature, history, science, religion, steampunk, and the supernatural. Check out the impressive list of past and present contributors.

In a way, I always considered disassociated to be more a webzine than anything else. Granted, only with one writer, and very much on and off in the twenty-five plus years this website has been online.

Rambles has no RSS feed that I can see, so you’ll have to read it the old fashion way: with a browser.

Substack, no alternative to independent websites and blogs

25 November 2024

Online publishing platform Substack, founded in 2017, was all anyone could talk about by 2022. Writers were scrambling to jump on the bandwagon, having heard tales of six-figure revenues being earned by some publishers. Even though we’ve heard those sorts of stories before. I even joined up myself, to see what the fuss was about.

But as someone who’s had their own web presence for decades, I couldn’t see the appeal of incorporating my brand into someone else’s. I think I only ever published one short article there.

But I’d already been hearing Substack appeared to permit the proliferation of misinformation, conspiracy theorists, and far-right ideologies, and was taking no action against the publishers of such content. I have no interest whatsoever in reading that sort of material, but it makes me wonder. Should content some people find objectionable actually be deleted by the administrators of a publishing platform like Substack? And then: how do we define what is acceptable, and what’s not?

For me, hate-speech and anything inciting violence or lawlessness, is unacceptable. Other topics, such as misinformation, and conspiracy theories, may be a little harder to quantify. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, almost everyone I knew complied with stay-at-home orders, and vaccine mandates. However there were some, neighbours, and others I’d see regularly, who hitherto seemed to be no different than me, convinced COVID-19 was a hoax, and the vaccines posed a serious threat.

I’d tell these people I disagreed with what they thought, but their resolve was unstinting. They believed absolutely in what they thought. They were wrong in my eyes, their views plain dangerous to say the least, but this is a democracy, and, like it or lump it, we’re all entitled to our opinion. No doubt, some of these people, would, if they read my blog, object to some of the content I publish here. But does that, of itself, constitute grounds for having it (somehow) forcibly removed?

But back to Substack. American blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, for one, believes the platform was created to give voice to extremists:

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four.

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball, however counters with the idea that Substack is simply an open-for-all publishing platform:

I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

Despite my indifference to Substack, this is largely how I see things as well. I’ve read numerous articles published on Substack, which are just always useful and informative. I’ve never encountered anything hateful, deliberately misleading, or conspiratorial, though obviously such content exists. As it would on self-hosted websites/blogs that are not part of any publishing platform.

Calls to have such content removed seem pointless, unless laws, defamation for instance, are contravened. Fighting fire with fire may be the only option. Writing in response, and criticising material that is hateful or misleading. Do so from your own, self-hosted, independent, website though. Do not allow any publishing platform to assimilate your brand, or your content.

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