According to recordings of internal meetings shared with the New York Times, the tech giant Meta held discussions over the potential acquisition of prominent book publisher Simon & Schuster for Advanced AI training. From the recordings, it was found that the company’s staff had discussed buying Simon & Schuster and some had debated paying $10 per book for the licensing rights to new titles.
Simon & Schuster, a leading book publisher, boasts an expansive catalog rich with books from celebrated authors including Stephen King and Bob Woodward. Meta eyed the publisher to take its AI endeavors to the advanced level.
Meta’s VP of generative AI, Ahmed Aldahleh, says that nearly every accessible English text on the internet had already been utilized for AI training. The company’s thirst for fresh, quality training materials led to conversations about Simon & Schuster. Meta engineers were considering a new licensing rights fee per book, demonstrating the seriousness of this initiative.
The potential move comes on the heels of Paramount Global’s decision to divest Simon & Schuster. In March 2020, Paramount Global, the parent company of Simon & Schuster, announced its intention to sell the publisher. After a much-criticised planned merger with Penguin Random House was blocked by US courts, Simon & Schuster was eventually sold to private equity firm KKR in August 2023.
Acquiring Simon & Schuster could provide Meta with a unique competitive advantage by vastly enriching its AI training data sets with high-quality, diverse literature. AI systems require massive and varied data to improve their accuracy and to generate human-like text. Using books from a renowned book publisher could lead to significant advances in AI systems’ understanding of complex language, storytelling, and information processing.
Staff also discussed having hired contractors in Africa to aggregate summaries of fiction and non-fiction texts, which contained copyrighted content “because we have no way of not collecting that”, said one manager.
Maria A Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, does not believe that Simon & Schuster would have agreed to such a sale:
“The fact that Meta sought to purchase one of the most important publishing houses in American history in order to ingest its venerable catalogue for AI profits is puzzling even for Big Tech,” she said. “Did Meta plan to trample the primary mission of Simon & Schuster, and its contractual partnerships with authors, by sheer power?”
Navkiran Dhaliwal is a seasoned content writer with 10+ years of experience. When she's not writing, she can be found cooking up a storm or spending time with her dog, Rain.