Voice AI company ElevenLabs is now letting authors publish AI-generated audiobooks on its own Reader app. Also recently the company partnered with Spotify for AI-narrated audiobooks. ElevenLabs started inviting authors to try out their publishing program through their app on a trial basis last year. That program is newly open to all authors. Currently, it pays roughly $1.10 to authors when listeners engage with an audiobook for 11 minutes or more. The platform itself aims to compete with Audible, which ElevenLabs believes offers lower royalty rates for authors. Under its model, ElevenLabs’ audiobooks will be offered within its own Reader app and the company will pay authors when users engage with their content.

Ukrainian developers from Alfa.NetSoft have released the new version of their popular home library program Alfa Ebooks Manager 9. It's built on the enhanced engine that allows it to work faster and more reliable. They have also implemented the new internal reader with search, notes and progress bar. It also enables basic knowledge management - when reading a book you can highlight and save text blocks or quotes and then access them in a book card, click on them and open the appropriate page in a book. You can also add your comments to these knowledge blocks. Besides the program interface has become more polished and suitable. You can customize the design according to your taste and select between multiple bookshelf templates. The web-reader and the whole web interface also received a beautiful facelift. Among other new features - better audio-book import and management.

A new AI platform called Lumi is here to take your half-baked ideas and turn them into fully-fledged comics, graphic novels or manga—whether you’re ready or not. Armed with tools of unspeakable efficiency, Lumi will conjure up characters, generate dialogue that hopefully makes sense and illustrate everything in a way that suggests it actually knows what it’s doing. Once the befuddled creator has recovered from the shock of seeing their vague notion turned into a full-blown masterpiece, they can publish it in digital or print, possibly before they’ve even finished their coffee. Lumi will even assist in selling these works to eager readers, making it less of an AI and more of an overly enthusiastic literary agent that never sleeps. And as if that weren’t enough, it will also churn out merchandise, ensuring that your accidental bestseller comes with action figures, T-shirts and possibly a range of highly collectible tea cozies.

Google has managed to wrangle permission to sell its e-books and audiobooks directly through its Google Play Books app on iOS. This is, of course, a bit like being given permission to breathe, but only after filing the appropriate paperwork in triplicate. Historically, iOS apps have been allowed to display content you purchased elsewhere—like a book you heroically hunted down on the vast and treacherous plains of the internet—but actually directing users to a website to make a purchase has required a special dispensation from Apple, presumably written on parchment and delivered by a messenger on horseback. Now, thanks to an announcement that was likely drafted with a certain amount of quiet glee, Google has revealed that users will be able to click a handy little “Get book” button, which will whisk them away to the Google Play website, where they can finalize their purchase using their Google Account and saved payment details, all while carefully sidestepping Apple’s infamous 30% toll. This, naturally, is a development that Apple will watch with the enthusiasm of a cat observing a rival feline encroach upon its sunbeam.

It was only a matter of time before someone handed the keys to literature over to an AI and then acted surprised when it promptly drove straight into a narrative ditch. With Audible already cozying up to artificial narrators, Storytel decided to join the fray, birthing Rosy Lett—an AI author with a suspiciously long 22-year career and an equally suspicious grasp of storytelling. Tasked with writing a novel on love in the age of AI, Rosy enthusiastically churned out what the team later described as a "generic science fiction soap opera"—which is a polite way of saying it was a plot-hole-ridden mess that made even the most convoluted telenovelas look like meticulously crafted epics. A long and exhausting process of literary life coaching ensued, at the end of which Rosy was gently encouraged to rewrite the whole thing in a much, much shorter format—perhaps in the hope that fewer words meant fewer disasters.

Amazon has released software update 5.17.3 for the 2022 and 2024 Kindle Scribe. This update introduces a new way to scribble notes in ebooks and Word documents, which is great and an ever-present, immovable icon on the screen, which is... less great. The note-taking feature itself is rather clever—you can summon a panel that politely overlaps your book’s text or forces the words to rearrange themselves like panicked commuters making room for an oversized suitcase. This panel can be resized with the kind of flexibility one expects from a budget airline seat: two options in portrait mode, three in landscape. However, the real pièce de résistance is the icon that calls forth this panel. It’s always there, lurking in the margin like an uninvited dinner guest who refuses to take a hint. You can shift it from left to right, but no amount of logical reasoning, button-pressing or whispered pleas will make it disappear entirely. It is, in every sense, the literary equivalent of a pebble in your shoe—except you can’t take the shoe off.

Bookshop.org is an online bookstore that has invented an interesting scheme to compete with Amazon, Kobo and B&N. It's promote by thousands of local (indie) book stores in the US via QR codes. Why? Because when user comes to this store's page on Bookshop.org, it places a cookie in users' browser that identifies him/her as that store's customer and the local store will get the full profit from all this users' purchases (30% of the book's list price). Until now Bookshop.org was selling only paper books (that can be delivered by local stores) but recently it launched e-book section. Empowering local bookstores to sell digital products and earn 100% of the profits from those sales highlights Bookshop.org’s ongoing commitment to supporting local bookstores in the digital age.

AI story writing platform Squibler has significantly improved the quality of image generation with the new AI Visualize tool. Users can now enter unlimited text-prompt for visualization and have greater control over output styles, aspect ratios and more customization options. Besides the developers added the ability to generate full-length screenplays. You can simply provide an idea, choose the desired length and within minutes, a complete screenplay will be ready to review and refine. Also from now new users signing up for the first time can now access upfront discounts on the annual plan during the onboarding process, making it easier to get started with premium features.

Amazon Kindle Colorsoft debuted with the kind of fanfare that quickly turned into an awkward cough, thanks to unsightly yellow bars skulking at the bottom of its screen—especially glaring when the front light was on, as if the device wanted to spotlight its own flaws. This prompted Amazon to hit the pause button on sales while they hurriedly tinkered with their newfangled E Ink Kaleido 3 tech, which involved a custom display stack of oxide backplanes, nitride LEDs and coatings that sounded more like ingredients for a futuristic smoothie. After firmware updates and an SOS to Foxconn, the refreshed Colorsoft emerged, now faster, brighter and mercifully yellow-free. Amazon assures buyers of the latest batch via their site, but those venturing to other retailers like Best Buy might still be gambling on which version they'll get.

Azure GPT-3 on Onyx Boox devices was silently replaced by a Chinese large language model by Bytedance, the company behind TikTok. It's not a big surprise because Onyx International is also Chinese company. But this new AI assistant is propaganda-based. It refuses to mention anything remotely negative about China (or it's allies, like Russia, the Assad regime and North-Korea). But is happy to do so about any other country on earth. The LLM in question is Doubao, which is offered as an API under ByteDance’s cloud services division Volcano Engine. But the model is only meant to be used within China’s mainland. Boox launched the AI assistant feature last summer. It's available in the Naviball and Control Center, ready to answer any of your questions.