Barnes & Noble CEO Backs Selling AI-Written Books in Stores

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The retail bookseller plans to open 60 more stores in the US this year:

James Daunt, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, has declared that he has "no problem" with AI-written books being sold in the retailer's stores.

In a recent segment for NBC News' "Business in America" series, Today host Jenna Bush Hager asked Daunt how AI has affected the book publishing industry. The question came amid fierce concerns in creative industries about AI-generated content replacing authentic human art, and artists seeing paid work disappear as their literature is being used to train AI models.

"You have said that if the rise of AI books becomes a thing, you would be willing to sell them within your stores," Bush Hager said.

"Yes, I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn't masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn't," the British businessman responded. "And that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it."

"So as long as an AI-written book says it's an AI-written book and doesn't pretend to be something else and isn't ripping off somebody else, as long as that's clearly stated and the customer wants to buy it, then we will stock them."

"We have 300,000 titles across all of our stores," Daunt, who became the CEO of Barnes & Noble in 2019, added. "Do we think that some of those may be AI? The chances are that they are, but we're not really conscious of them."

He also argued that in this moment, it doesn't seem like those AI-generated books "are going to get much commercial traction."

"So I think it's something that one should treat with common sense and acceptance, but not allow anything to masquerade [as]," he explained. He said that the "clarity around who the author is and whether they're a real person" is what's crucial.

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