Future Forward

References to the keynote address at the Editors Canada conference in Vancouver, June 2024.

Number of tech generation per calendar year: 7 versions per year … is what Microsoft makes it seem like.

Editor V AI — testing various AI on editing for grammar.

NYT article on AI Hype

Angwin, Julia. “Will A.I. Ever Live Up to Its Hype?The New York Times (May 15, 2024)

Testing whether ChatGPT can actually pass the bar exam.

Chemists test whether ChatGPT actually came up with new and useful compounds.

Self-publishing

Book publishing has increased by 10x but now 2/3 of the titles on Amazon are self-published. More books are being sold than ever! (But revenue hasn’t changed in 10 years.)

According to the latest Bowker data (Publishers Weekly, February 20, 2023), 2.3 million books were self-published in the US in 2021, which was the third year in a row that more than 2 million books were self-published. This is the number of new titles that received an ISBN from Bowker. Several years ago Bowker stopped releasing the numbers of new titles that were not self-published, but a recent industry estimate is that each year “between 500,000 to 1 million . . . new titles are published through traditional publishers” (Dean Talbot, “Number of Books Published per Year,” WordsRated, February 2, 2022). So the total number of new titles being published each year in the US—combining self-published and traditionally published titles—is approximately 3 million. And here is the truly shocking figurethe annual number of new titles published each year has grown by more than ten times in the past sixteen years. According to Bowker, just 282,500 new titles (combining self-published titles and traditionally published titles) were published in the US in 2005 (Bowker Report, April 14, 2010).

Steven Piersanti, The 10 Awful Truths about Book Publishing

Imaginable

Imaginable by future forecaster Jane McGonigal

Computer Software that Aids Editing

PerfectIt, Editorium, EdiFix, macros, Word. But not Grammarly; it failed grammar tests abysmally.

Making Editing Pay Better

Promoting livable wages (even thriving ones) via the Instant Estimator so clients can plan the necessary budget.

Promoting Enough TIME for Editing

Project planner and time estimates

Standards for Editing

Editing by Any Other Name

Credentials Becoming Required

And there are more than a dozen editing certificates from accredited schools now. Plus “advanced” status from editing organizations like Ciep and Certification as well as “entry level” tests from Editors Canada.

Un-WEIRDing Editing

  • Indian Copyeditors Association
  • LGBTQ+ Editors Association
  • Neurodivergent Editors (Facebook group)
  • Editors of Color Association
  • Editors Canada DEI committee

Comparing YouTube uploads and the library of Alexandria

YouTube Hours of video uploaded each minute, via Statista. (Note Vimeo, TikTok and so on add to the total number of videos uploaded to the web.)

Library of Alexandria — calculating words in the scrolls

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