IP Picks🔎: A Time-Traveling Indiana Jones
➕ What happens to BookTok if the TikTok ban becomes a reality?
Welcome to The Optionist. Let's start things off this week with an L.A. feel-good story to lift our spirits a tiny bit. John Szabo, the Librarian of Los Angeles — great title, btw — has just been named Library Journal's 2024 Librarian of the Year.
The L.A. Public Library system is one of the city's most overlooked gems. It offers so much to so many and it will become an even more important refuge and cultural institution in the days ahead as the Palisades, Altadena and other hard-hit areas embark on the long and arduous rebuilding process.
I don't use the city’s branches as much as I used to, but the LAPL has been there every time I’ve needed it. Years ago, I did a story on its amazing historic menu collection. When I recently wrote about the Universal Studios basketball team going to the 1936 Olympics, its photo archive was invaluable. Last year, I contributed a chapter to a scholarly book on L.A. County as a place distinct from “Los Angeles” that prompted me to dig into the library's collections to write about the history of porn. (Yes, really. Also, fascinating.)
Please read the profile of Szabo (linked above), which sings his praises and recaps his many accomplishments since taking over this underappreciated position in 2012. It’s a ray of light during one of this city’s darkest hours. It’s also a reminder of how some people can make this giant metropolis of ours feel like a small town now and then.
Something big is happening this weekend. No, it's not the Outlander finale or the Rams’ playoff game or even Joe Biden's last day in the Oval Office. The proposed TikTok ban is set to go into effect when the calendar turns from the 19th to the 20th. That is, unless ByteDance (the platform's Chinese owners) sells to an American buyer, which looks increasingly unlikely.
Many people in the publishing industry are wondering what will happen to BookTok if TikTok and its 170 million American users go away. After all, BookTok is more than just a platform for book lovers to share their passions and discoveries; it has snowballed into a phenomenon with an outsized impact on book sales in the U.S. Ironically, the ban goes into effect the day before the release of Onyx Storm, the newest book in Rebecca Yarros’ hit romantasy series, which has been the biggest beneficiary of BookTok.
Here's what we know — and what we don't know — about what's about to happen. The ban is really a ban on the app in different operating-system app stores (iOS, Android) and not a ban on the platform, per se. So when you wake up on the morning of Jan. 20, TikTok would theoretically remain unchanged. Emphasis on “theoretically.”
Without updates to the app, the stability and usability of TikTok would eventually degrade over time. When the operating systems are updated, it will stop working altogether and the user base will vanish. That's the best-case scenario of an extended slow decline.
In practice, there are reports that say ByteDance will go a step further and immediately disable the whole app from day one, presumably to pressure the U.S. government to repeal the ban. But we don't know exactly what's going to happen because ByteDance hasn't said. One thing the company has announced is that users will be able to preserve their content by downloading it to their personal computers or phones. So there’s that.
Is a repeal still possible? Maybe. A very odd bipartisan coalition — how often do you see liberal Democrats like Ed Markey and Ro Khanna teaming up with conservatives like Rand Paul and Donald Trump? — asked the Supreme Court to delay the ban, but the Court voted 9-0 Friday morning to allow the law to stand. Shortly after, Trump said the decision should be respected, but held out the promise of a last-minute reprieve: “My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!”
Another thing that no one knows is where the BookTok crowd will migrate to if the app goes dark. Some predict Instagram; others say YouTube. What about Bluesky? Or Substack? Some BookTok creators are concerned about the increasing possibility of hate speech on Instagram now that Mark Zuckerberg has decided to pull back on content moderation on the platform. My hunch is that BookTok will splinter across multiple channels and be reconfigured in unpredictable ways on these new platforms. But short of an immediate reversal, BookTok as we know it is over.
Is this possibly a good thing? Some creators believe so. “I personally think that BookTok has kind of reached its peak,” Sera Wright, a BookTok creator with 77k followers told USA Today, before adding that she thinks whatever happens, the transformation of book promotion via social media is here to stay even if the where and how is unclear. "BookTok didn’t create the book community, the book community created BookTok.”
Stay tuned. We haven’t heard the last of this.
Finally, Created by Humans, a new AI rights licensing platform, has launched. It promises to give authors a one-stop hub to offer their works for use in training large language models (or specify that they're off limits). Potentially, this could be a streamlined solution to the Wild West of AI training. It could also ensure that writers are compensated if their work is used. Such authors as Walter Isaacson, Douglas Preston and Susan Orlean have endorsed the platform. (The support of Isaacson, whose biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk have shown him to be overly solicitous of Silicon Valley, makes this immediately suspect to me.)
Still, the real rub is this: Asked if the company had a projection as to how much money an author could make by licensing their rights, CEO Trip Adler called this “the billion dollar question” of what data is worth in an AI world. He also noted that opinions vary widely, with "some people who believe all data should be free" while others believe "human data is the most valuable resource ever."
My take is that creativity is consistently undervalued. Look at what's happened to musicians' income in a streaming world. We've seen this in Hollywood as well, where the streaming model has undermined the income of rank-and-file creators and crew. My hunch is that whatever Created by Humans offers, it isn't going to be enough. I personally don't think any writer should license their content to help build AI models. They can't happen without it. If enough people hold out, it could force companies to pay fair value.
On to this week’s picks, which include a super-fun time-travel adventure plus a journalism story I really loved that could be the basis for a really great Glengarry Glen Ross-type drama. The full lineup:
A sci-fi adventure about a time-traveling archaeologist trying to recover a valuable artifact in Istanbul and fix the greatest mistake of his career
A thriller about three high school friends reuniting 25 years after the disappearance of their friend while trying to figure out if a new murder might be related
A high-tech thriller about a corporate psychological profiler who suspects that a serial killer revealed himself during its testing
A mystery/thriller about the murder of an heiress to a Succession-like media fortune and why the woman who just married into the family was named as her beneficiary
A drama in the Glengarry Glen Ross mold
