News

Today, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), and Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) jointly filed an amicus brief in support of the author, publisher, and news publisher plaintiffs in In Re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation, pending before the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  The case consolidates numerous actions filed over the past three years againstOpenAI for its sweeping, unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train commercial AI models, resulting in equally sweeping harm to markets and livelihoods, and against Microsoft for its knowing participation in and support of OpenAI’s infringing conduct, including a September 2023 action by the Authors Guild, David Baldacci, John Grisham, Scott Turow, and other prominent fiction writers.  In asking the court to grant the plaintiffs’ summary judgment motion on the merits, and to deny the defendants’, the amici explain that fair use “is intended to adapt—not yield—to changes in technology.”  The court’s determination will likely be the first opinion from a New York court as to copyright and AI training.

Statement from Maria A. Pallante, AAP President and CEO, on behalf of the Amici:

“In this brief, we are pleased to share with the court the routine role of licensing in digital copyright commerce and why the failure of AI companies to pay for the works they need is an unjustified and damaging departure from the operation and integrity of the law.  It has become clear that—without any say in the matter—authors and publishers have been integral to producing Open AI’s large language models, which absent guardrails and financial participation have the power to diminish both the value of the works copied and the long-term viability of human authorship more generally. For these tech giants to argue ‘fair use’ in the face of such jolting and far-reaching conduct is to ignore the equitable basis of the legal doctrine and its fundamental concern for the public interest."  

Excerpts from the brief:

• The Copyright Act reflects Congress’s considered determination that exclusive rights, market-based licensing, and voluntary exchange encourages the creation and dissemination of books and other works. This framework remains the same no matter how much technological innovation changes the way copyrighted works are created, distributed, or used. Using copyrighted works to train generative AI models does not warrant special treatment.

• Overly expansive interpretations of fair use displace the market mechanisms Congress established, replacing negotiated exchange with uncompensated use and transferring value from the authors and publishers that invest in them to industries that neither incurred the costs nor assumed the risks of producing the underlying works.

• The technological innovation of AI is no talisman for fair use. The fair use doctrine is intended to adapt—not yield—to changes in technology. Congress expected copyright protection to encompass unforeseen technologies, and drafted the Copyright Act with broad, technologically neutral rights and specific exceptions so that copyright owners could presumptively retain their exclusive rights even over new technological uses.

• ChatGPT has generated sequels that are substitutes for George R. R. Martin’s much-anticipated book, The Winds of Winter. ChatGPT’s substitutive character was enabled not only by training on a pirated copy of Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, but also by pursuing a “research mission” to develop an LLM that can “write the last two books of . . . A Song of Ice And Fire.”

• The defendants themselves have acknowledged these market dilution harms. An OpenAI researcher forewarned that it would become “impossible to tell” whether material was AI-generated given his goal to “make the most artisanal slop.” A Microsoft employee also concluded that the economic harm from LLMs included “authors . . . who were no longer able to sell their books because there are so many substitutive AI-generated books out there.”

• Here, a market for licensing copyrighted works for AI exists and is expanding to address growing demands and developing infrastructure. The list of publicly reported AI licensing arrangements is extensive, covering works of all types and AI developers of all sizes…. The AI training market for licensing for all content types was valued at $5.2 billion in 2025, with text holding the largest share of the market, and is projected to rapidly reach $55.8 billion by 2035.

• For AI to flourish, licensing is needed to ensure humans continue to be incentivized to create so that the well of human creation does not run dry and AI companies have reliable access to content that improves model performance.

• As an OpenAI researcher aptly stated: “Our AI content strategy has started a doom loop that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time.... LLMs are useful because they replicate the patterns in the training content, which without ways of distributing economic value down the supply chain, necessarily threatens the economic sustainability of those who create the content.”

The full amicus brief can be found here.

Today publishers called on Meta to drop its onerous new commercial terms of service, which would give the mega-corporation virtually unlimited rights to use its vast army of “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents” to “access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them)” that are associated with business users products or services.

Statement from Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers

In putting forth these onerous terms of service Meta is implicitly acknowledging that permission is required for them to use creative works to develop and improve their products. But at the same time this mega-corporation is abusing its dominant market power by compelling such consent from any commercial user who connects to any of their platforms.

In terms of practical effect, this policy would unreasonably expropriate valuable intellectual property from authors and publishers that is completely unconnected with their commercial use of Meta, while at the same time leverage Meta’s market power to give it an unfair advantage over its competitors.

AAP has long advocated for a level playing field in the marketplace of ideas, a marketplace threatened by the alarming dominance of a few tech platforms that wield extraordinary leverage over competitors, users, the government, and the public. These terms represent the latest such threat and are an appalling landgrab of unprecedented proportion that must not be tolerated.

Trade (Consumer Books) Revenues Up 12.5% for Month of August, and Up 6.5% Year-to-Date

Today, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) released its StatShot report covering August 2026, reflecting reported revenue for Trade (Consumer Books), Education (combines PreK-12 Instructional Materials and Higher Education Course Materials), and Professional & Scholarly Publishing.

Total revenue across all categories for August 2026 was up 8.9%, coming in at $1.2 billion as compared to August 2025. Year-to-date, compared with 2025, revenues were up 5.9%, at $7.9 billion in 2026.

The full report is available for purchase on AAP’s website.

Trade (Consumer Books) Revenues

August

Trade (Consumer Books) revenues were up 12.5% in August at $904.7 million. In terms of physical formats during the month of August, in the Trade (Consumer Books) category, Hardback revenues were up 13.8%, coming in at $320.2 million; Paperbacks were up 17.6%, with $333.3 million in revenue; Mass Market was down 14.6% to $6.2 million; and Special Bindings were up 3.7%, with $20.4 million in revenue. 

eBook revenues were down 5.7% to $83.9 million for the month, and revenues from the Digital Audio format were up 12.6% for August, coming in at $105.4 million. Physical Audio revenues were down 35.2%, coming in at $400 thousand.

Year-to-date

Year-to-date Trade revenues were up 6.5% to $6.3 billion. Hardback revenues were up 3.1% year-to-date, coming in at $2.1 billion; Paperbacks were up 11.8%, with $2.3 billion in revenue; Mass Market was down 57.2% to $26.9 million; and Special Bindings were up 14.5%, with $152.6 million in revenue.

eBook revenues were down 3.4% compared to 2025, totaling $685.1 million. Digital Audio revenue was up 12.6% to $806.3 million, while Physical Audio revenue was down 11.9% to $3.5 million.

Religious Presses Up 11.0% for August

Religious Presses revenue was up 11.0% compared to the same month in 2025, coming in at $85.3 million. Hardback revenues were up 16.2% at $53.8 million; Paperback revenues were up 5.1% to $15.2 million; eBook revenues were down 8.6%, coming in at $3.9 million; and Digital Audio revenues were up 3.2%, at $4.3 million.

On a year-to-date basis, Religious Presses revenue was up 2.2% during the first eight months of 2026 when compared with the same period in 2025, coming in at $558.4 million. Hardback revenues were down 0.1% to $329.0 million; Paperback revenue was up 7.8% to $108.1 million; eBook revenue was down 1.8% to $32.6 million; and Digital Audio revenue was essentially flat at $31.7 million.

Professional & Scholarly Publishing Up 8.0% for August 2026

Professional & Scholarly Publishing, including business, medical, law, technical, scientific, and other books and excluding journals, was up 8.0% for August 2026, coming in at $29.6 million. The category was up 1.8% for the first eight months of the year when compared to the same period in 2025, coming in at $261.5 million.

Education Materials (including PreK-12 Instructional Materials and Higher Education Course Materials) Down 2.8% for August 2026

During August 2026, revenues from Education Materials totaled $256.8 million, down 2.8% compared with August 2025. Year-to-date Education Materials revenues totaled $1.2 billion, up 1.8% compared to the first eight months of 2025.

AAP’s StatShot

AAP StatShot reports the monthly and yearly net revenue of publishing houses from U.S. sales to bookstores, wholesalers, direct to consumer, online retailers, and other channels. StatShot draws revenue data from more than 1,411 publishers, although participation may fluctuate slightly from report to report.

StatShot reports are designed to give ongoing revenue snapshots across publishing sectors using the best data currently available. The reports reflect participants’ most recent reported revenue for current and previous periods, enabling readers to compare revenue on both a month-to-month and year-to-year basis within a given StatShot report.

Monthly and yearly StatShot reports may not align completely across reporting periods, because: a) The pool of StatShot participants may fluctuate from report to report; and b) Like any business, it is common accounting practice for publishing houses to update and restate their previously reported revenue data. If, for example, a business learns that its revenues were greater in a given year than its reports first indicated, it will restate the revenues in subsequent reports to AAP, permitting AAP in turn to report information that is more accurate than previously reported.

Becomes First Publisher to Receive the Award Twice

Today, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) awarded Avesta Publishing House, based in Turkey, the 2026 AAP International Freedom to Publish Award. The award recognizes a publisher outside of the United States who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in defending freedom of expression.

Previously, Avesta was the 2005 Freedom to Publish Award recipient, and in 2019 the house was honored in the “Publisher” category of the Turkish Publishers Association’s “Freedom of Thought and Expression Awards.” In the years since these awards, Avesta has continued to operate under extremely difficult conditions, including threats, lawsuits and harassment. As a result, this award reflects the core values of AAP’s Freedom to Publish Award by recognizing a truly indefatigable dedication to publishing.

“AAP first recognized Avesta’s extraordinary contributions a little over twenty years ago and despite continuous threats and intimidation since that time their commitment to publishing has only grown stronger,” commented Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO, Association of American Publishers. “We are moved to celebrate Avesta’s brave, decades-long struggle because it underscores an essential fact: the battle for free expression is central to freedom more generally but is never truly won. It must be fought over and over, day by day, and decade after decade. On behalf of AAP’s Board of Directors, membership, and staff, I thank Avesta’s leadership and entire team for setting the standard for bravery, stamina and determination.”

“On behalf of Avesta, we thank AAP’s President, Board and staff for this extraordinary gesture,” commented Abdullah Keskin, the founder of Avesta. “Receiving AAP’s Freedom to Publish Award for the second time provides an enormous boost to our mission of encouraging Kurdish literature, research and culture, casting a bright light that will illuminate our way forward on the long road ahead.”

About Avesta Publishing House

Founded in Istanbul in 1995 with the motto “In Search of Lost Cultures,” Avesta Publishing House has published more than 900 books in multiple languages, focusing on works of Kurdish literature and research on the history and traditions of the Kurdish people. Between 1997 and 2007, Avesta faced several lawsuits in Turkey’s State Security Courts for roughly twenty of its publications, some of which were banned. In 2016, its warehouse in Sur/Diyarbakır was sabotaged, resulting in over 3,000 books being burned or rendered unusable and the bookstore being closed. In 2023, their website was banned on false claims of “terrorist propaganda.” Between 2017 and 2025, more than 20 of their books were banned by local courts.  

Sample Titles

Burhan's Book: I Left My Soul in That Land by Hüseyin Kalkan whom, after receiving threats for his reporting, was shot in the neck and paralyzed. In 2025, the Diyarbakır 2nd Magistrates' Court (Sulh Ceza Hakimliği) banned Burhan's Book: I Left My Soul in That Land along with four other books, ordering a moratorium on the printing, distribution, and sale of titles, along with the confiscation and seizure of all existing copies.

Martyrs, Traitors and Patriots – Kurdistan from the Gulf War to the Present Day by Sheri Laizer, against which the Mersin 3rd Criminal Court of Peace issued a ban and seizure decision 2017.

The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage and Justice, by American author Gayle Tzemach Lemmon and published in Turkish translation by Avesta, which has faced multiple ban and seizure orders.

About the AAP International Freedom to Publish Award

Established in 2002, AAP’s International Freedom to Publish Award recognizes a publisher outside the United States who has demonstrated courage and fortitude in defending freedom of expression. In bestowing the award, AAP is guided by the principle that if one of us is denied the right to publish that threat affects us all. Previous recipients of the award include Freedom Letters, a Russian and Ukrainian language publisher in 2025, Januškevič Publishing House, a Belarusian publisher that now operates from Poland in 2024, Venezuela-based Editorial Dahbar in 2022, Guatemala-based F&G Editores in 2021, and Bangladesh-based Jagriti Publishing House in 2020. In 2023, we did not specify one publisher, instead dedicating the award to publishing houses from around the world that face government pressure, harassment, and threats.

About AAP

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) represents the leading book, journal, and education publishers in the United States on matters of law and policy, advocating for outcomes that incentivize the publication of creative and intellectual expression in support of a vibrant, imaginative, and informed democracy. As essential participants in local markets and the global economy, our members invest in and inspire the exchange of ideas, transforming the world we live in one word at a time. AAP members include large, small, independent, educational, and scholarly houses who collectively publish the world’s preeminent authors, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Newbery Medal, Man Booker Prize, Caldecott Medal, and Nobel Prize. Learn more at publishers.org.

On September 30, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit released its opinion upholding the decision of the district court finding that ROSS Intelligence’s unlicensed use of Thomson Reuters’s copyrighted material to train a competing AI legal research platform was not fair use. Thomson Reuters filed suit in May 2020 when ROSS used Westlaw headnotes to train its AI platform. The district court in Delaware issued the first copyright opinion on the question of AI training, now being litigated along with other questions in approximately 150 cases in the United States.

“Rightsholders are entitled to equitable participation in the AI market, and we are pleased to see this milestone decision by the Third Circuit uphold the basic principles of fairness that will be central to a future in which innovation and creativity work together for all stakeholders and the public,” says AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante. “As the court indicates, AI is not the first technology to exploit expressive works of authorship, and ROSS usurped Thomson Reuters’s right to enter a derivative market for licensing headnotes for AI training.”

“As we explained in our amicus brief filed in November 2025, fair use cannot ‘ignore markets to which rightsholders are fundamentally entitled and are both exploiting and preparing to exploit.’ Here, on the fourth fair use factor, market effect of the use, the Third Circuit correctly noted that the licensing market for AI training not only exists but is ‘rapidly developing.’ Critically, the court noted that ROSS’s use harmed the value of works that draw users to the rightsholder’s platform and rejected the argument that a rightsholder’s decision not to license ‘does not disprove that a market exists to do so.’ 

We applaud the court for this powerful precedent, which supports the premise that a robust licensing market among developers and rightsholders is essential to achieving sustainable and ethical progress in AI technology.”

The opinion of the Third Circuit can be found here.