“Learnings” is a corporate buzzword intended to describe what you learned from some work activity. It sets my teeth on edge. You might feel the plural “learnings” is a perfectly legitimate word. After all, we have no problem talking about the teachings of Richard Feynman or Charles Darwin. And it’s perfectly understandable to discuss corporate…
I spent the last six months preparing for the Webinar I was supposed to give yesterday. Then I didn’t give it. Here’s how it went down. Between April and yesterday, several colleagues, sponsors, and I slaved over a report about the ROI of business books. Once the report was complete, I did a private Zoom…
The legal future of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and nearly every other large language model (LLM) depends on one question: when a large language model “reads” and “learns” from copyrighted content, is that action protected by the Fair Use provisions of copyright law? Vendors of LLMs insist that training their products on the open web is no…
Newsletter 67. Turnabout drives most book endorsements; where book stories come from; Elon Musk says not to trust intelligent machines. Plus three books to read, three books to follow, and a Webinar of surprising insights about the profitability of business books. The endorsement-go-round “Buy this book now! Or you’ll be sad later when your competitors…
This Thursday I’ll be on a Zoom Webinar to discuss results from the 2024 Business Book ROI study, conducted earlier this year on behalf of four business-book-oriented sponsors. Sign up here. It’s free. I spent many months working on this, and it’s the biggest data-heavy research report I’ve worked on since Forrester. I’ve already shared…
I inadvertently set off a firestorm on LinkedIn when, on a whim, I posted this: The minute I see an exclamation point in a post on LinkedIn, I immediately want to disbelieve the person sharing it and the content of what’s being shared. Is that just me, or do any of you feel the same…
I work with a lot of aspiring authors. Many of them have exciting and promising ideas. “Can’t the acquisitions editors at these publishers see the promise of my idea?”, they ask? No, they can’t. Editors who invested in the promise of books have been burned. A lot. Authors routinely fail to live up to that…
Lots of things are easy to sign up for. Lots of things are also not so easy to quit. With the new “click-to-cancel” rule implemented by the US Federal Trade Commission, that’s about to change. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission gets about 70 complaints a day about charges for subscriptions that are hard to cancel,…
Newsletter 66: Why polls captivate us; AI fails at reasoning; the valued discipline of writing, plus three people to follow, three books to read, and a free report on how business books generate revenue and profit. About that presidential horse race Why are we so fascinated with polls? Well, put that aside for a minute….