The war, the economic crisis, periods of waiting for the lights to be turned on and the desire to escape from harsh reality are some of the negative factors that have become the driving force behind the trend of growing demand for reading materials in Ukraine.
“There was a real boom. People read in shelters, on the road, even soldiers on the front lines,” says the CEO of the popular book platform Yakaboo Olena Bezugla.
According to the observations of Knygarny E, in 2024 there is an increase in demand for electronic books. And although the majority (46%) prefer paper editions, 17% prefer the convenient electronic format, and 13% prefer audiobooks. Olena Bezugla confirms that the demand for electronic editions in their publishing house also increased by 30%. According to forecasts of Google internal data, the trend of growth in demand for electronic products continues and is already 9%.
Such a trend is quite understandable, since the publication of an electronic format costs less than the paper version. The terms of preparation and release of the electronic edition are insignificant and there are no difficulties with the delivery of such a book. It affects the demand and the difference in the price of editions of different formats. Yes, an e-book is 30% cheaper than a paper one. While the price of a paper book has increased by 37.5% since the full-scale invasion. But you should not draw false conclusions about the cheap price of an e-book. In fact, as noted by publishers, the price of an e-book depends on the manufacturer’s costs. And those, in turn, depend on many factors, such as:
- the cost of the license;
- processing costs;
- advertising expenses;
- pay;
- publisher’s income;
- taxes
Also, the rights holders impose a royalty of 25-40% on the income from electronic editions, while the royalty for paper editions is 8-12%. It is obvious that the so-called “cheapness” of e-books is far-fetched.
Having analyzed the data of various publishing houses regarding the ratio of sales of electronic and paper publications, we can come to the conclusion that the average figure is 15% and 80%. Obviously, the traditional book is still on the pedestal. Buying an e-book is more about convenience and speed. It often happens that the desired edition is difficult to find in printed format, since it takes a lot of time and money to appear, and therefore, there is every chance to find the desired book in the electronic version sooner.
According to a study by the Ukrainian Book Institute, 12% of readers prefer the electronic format, but only 3% buy it. And this indicates a big problem of digital content in our country – piracy.
Reasons for the prosperity of piracy in Ukraine:
- lack of effective content protection tools on the platforms;
- lack of legal responsibility for both those who illegally distribute content and those who illegally download it;
- financial inability of society to purchase content for money.
However, publishers are still trying to develop ways to combat this problem:
- ban on downloading files from electronic applications of publications;
- block pirate sites in search engines;
- file encryption using anti-piracy systems.
- promotion in society of legal ways of acquiring electronic content and condemnation of piracy.
Creating books with the help of AI
The rapid development of modern technologies has led to the appearance of a number of useful programs, such as GPT-4 from Open AI, Sudowrite, Chapterly and Squibler. These applications have customized artificial intelligence, which is able to process a large number of queries and create entire stories and books based on them.
The appearance of AI in the field of writing has caused real discussions about the appropriateness of its use and the quality of writing books. On the one hand, such programs greatly facilitate the work of authors, removing some of the hard work from them and simplifying the description of certain scenes and moments in books. But on the other hand, most authors began to treat AI as a real threat, which in the coming years can quite easily displace real talented authors from their usual sphere, replacing on the book market works written by the colorful imagination of living people with books generated directly in programs , devoted to the creation of books.
So let’s understand the role of AI in the activities of modern writers, having analyzed the positive and negative sides of using programs of this kind when writing books.
It seems that in our time, AI is capable of most things – interesting communication, searching for information on the Internet, generating various ideas, creating incredible illustrations, music and books. It is so tightly integrated into the majority of human activities that people cannot imagine their lives without it. The use of AI in writing has become a new phenomenon that appeared not so long ago and immediately became popular among novice authors who are just starting their way to fame. The usefulness of such programs for beginners should not be dismissed, because they can show a person examples of various works, the construction and concept of the plot and provide the necessary initial skills when writing a book.
So far, AI-generated books have been viewed as experimental. Writing a book by a real author can take quite a long time, taking a long period of time that lasts months and years, while creating a finished book in AI takes a short time, immediately producing a finished result. In addition, the generation of books in AI has given rise to an influx of people who have never written real books in their lives and did not have a knack for it, to creative circles.
Anyone can start writing their own book working with AI. To do this, you need to find a program on the Internet that uses such an application, and start making requests in it that interest you most of all. AI is capable not only of generating ordinary texts, but also of helping the author to prescribe detailed scenes of stories, to listen to suggestions and new requests, improving or changing what has already been written. AI becomes an excellent assistant and co-author for a person, guiding him by the hand through all the complex organizational aspects of writing. If the author wants to write a work of a specific genre, then he needs to decide in advance about it, the characters and the concept of the plot and write down his vision in the corresponding request, so that the AI can process it and understand in what direction to create a new story.
AI works better when it is given clear and detailed information when asked. Therefore, you need to tell the program in detail what the future book will be about, about the heroes you describe in it, additional details of the new story, and this will significantly improve the result generated thanks to AI. In addition, the AI itself often adds a list of questions at the end of the text, by clicking on which, the author can ask the program to continue supplementing the story with additional questions, creating a complete picture of a complete book. But not everything is so easy and wonderful when working with AI. If the author tries to generate an arbitrary poem or a long poem in the application, then the AI is unable to follow the necessary procedure of correct rhyming and makes significant mistakes in this kind of poetry. There were cases when authors tried to generate in their prose works scenes of violence, cruelty, torture and other moments that a serious work may require. In this case, a fuse is added to most of the AI, which prohibits describing violent scenes, and then the program either rejects such requests or changes the described scenes to ones that are more acceptable for censorship.
However, AI is not human, and therefore is capable of making many mistakes in spelling and punctuation. That is why, when editing generated works, the presence of a living person is still necessary, who will check the text for errors and compliance of the plot and characters with the concept of the story. Otherwise, the book will turn out to be imperfect, written with a set of strange sentences and insufficiently revealed inner world of the characters, because AI is not capable of understanding the entire bright spectrum of emotions of a real person.
Despite all this, AI remains a great helper for beginners, but the results generated by it are still far from ideal and are full of repetitions, too dry sentences, an almost complete lack of interesting detailed dialogues between the characters and unrealistic behavior of such characters, which can surprise the average reader and cause many controversial questions to the work. AI is not capable of creating complete books with sophisticated descriptions, a sequence of scenes, unexpected plot twists, detailed disclosure of each described image, which a real talented author with a rich imagination and extensive experience in the field of writing is capable of.
In the hands of talented authors, AI is able to become exactly the necessary tool for improving their activities. Combined with the imagination and creativity of people, AI is becoming a new tool that allows writers to reach new heights and get a vision of their own books from the side of the program. Beginning authors can learn new aspects of their activities and the formation of full-fledged stories and poetry with the help of AI, and professional writers discover new directions of creativity and analysis of their plots. Don’t think that writing books with AI is a bad thing. No need to let the program do everything for you. It only provides the necessary materials, available examples and analysis of the author’s ideas, but the same author is still at the helm of the fantasy ship and only he can decide how best to use the help of AI when writing a book. The program opens up new horizons for all people and gives an opportunity to look at the creative process in a new way, to acquire the initial necessary skills and to improve one’s own author’s ideas, polishing them to perfection.
However, despite all its usefulness, AI has already managed to cause certain inconveniences in the e-book market. One such case happened at Amazon, forcing it to limit the sale of e-books on its own Kindle Direct Publishing platform. As the representatives of the company explained, this restriction was caused by significant book spam, during which the sale of e-books generated with the help of AI increased. It was to reduce this spam that the company introduced significant restrictions on the sale of such books. Now on the platform, users can publish no more than three books for sale per day.
“While we haven’t seen a dramatic increase in the number of posts, to protect against brazen abuse, we are reducing the volume limits that apply to new works.” – said the Amazon company.
Company representatives reassured users, saying that this restriction will affect only a small number of authors. The company was forced to introduce new rules and guidelines for publishing books on its platform. If the books were generated by AI, then the authors must be notified in advance before publishing such books.
In early September, the company warned all authors that AI-generated content would now be tracked on the platform and would henceforth be subject to careful moderation. These innovations were created following the significant discovery of books created by AI that brazenly imitated the works of real talented authors. In August, The New York Times also published an interesting detailed investigation, during which it confirmed the fact that Amazon was selling generated books that were published on behalf of fake authors who had AI-generated photos on their avatars.
Against the background of this threat of proliferation of content created by the hands of AI, significant market players who worked with artificial intelligence, such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, had to take full responsibility before the White House for the development of AI and the duty to use it in good faith in all areas human activity.
So, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, despite all the difficulties, electronic publications are gaining popularity in Ukraine. The desire to break away from harsh reality, to learn one’s own identity and to search for questions of a historical and political nature prompt society to use the latest technologies in publishing. Of course, the e-book will not replace the paper edition, but will become a convenient addition to the ways of reading. In conditions of constant moving and possible damage, it is obvious that the electronic edition has its advantages.
