Book Publishers Build AI Ties as Lawsuits Continue

The report says that while the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges. Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O’Reilly Media and Penguin Random House to enhance e-books from its Google Play store with AI, allowing readers to interact with the text of the books directly, ask questions and get answers, and develop tools such as quizzes and slideshows. The CEO of the Author’s Guild called the partnership “a positive step forward in the legitimized use of books in the AI ecosystem to the benefit of readers, publishers, and authors alike.”

Licensing deals are also expanding. In 2024, HarperCollins became the first of the Big Five to publicly reveal that it had signed a deal to license its content for AI training. The three-year agreement paid $5,000 per participating title, split equally between HarperCollins and the authors, according to the report. Wiley announced its first AI licensing deal in 2024 and has since made several more. For fiscal year 2026, it reported earning $49 million in revenue from the deals. The company also has strategic collaborations with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Anthropic, Perplexity, IQVIA, OpenEvidence and others.

Publishers are building in-house AI tools for producing royalty statements, proofreading and customer service. In its 2025 Salary and Jobs Report, Publishers Weekly reported that 63% of industry professionals surveyed said their organizations were using AI. Keith Riegert, president of the Stable Book Group and CEO of Perfect Bound, has been a vocal advocate for the use of AI in publishing even though he calls himself a “hardcore techno-pessimist.” He told Publishers Weekly, “I do this because you use AI or you die at this point....” He maintains that any use of AI must “start with a human and end with a human,” and he draws a clear line, avoiding AI for core creative work, such as selecting titles, designing covers or creating illustrations, and reserving it for developmental editing, formatting and administrative tasks.

The report says each of the Big Five is developing proprietary AI systems for internal use, pointing to numerous AI-related job openings the companies have posted. The parent company of Penguin Random House said in 2025 that it used AI for marketing and to forecast demand.

There have been a few high-profile controversies about prominent authors accused of using AI. Christie Henry, CEO of Princeton University Press, is less concerned about authors secretly using AI to write than about the time spent policing the situation. “It pulls us away from having focused time to think,” she said. Princeton University Press is currently vetting companies that promise to be able to certify that a given book was written by a human, including Created by Humans, Human Authored and Verify My Writing. Henry added that the proliferation of plagiarized, copycat and pirated books online, now supercharged by AI agents mass producing and reproducing content, is further draining resources, because it demands constant vigilance and takedown requests sent to Amazon, YouTube and others.