By Kim Pawlak
While class members await United States District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin’s approval of the final settlement in the landmark $1.5 billion copyright infringement class action Bartz v. Anthropic, class attorney Rohit Nath, a partner at Susman Godfrey, said class members can reach out to the claims administrator for a report on their claim. That report, he said, includes “any other parties that have filed claims on their work and the requested percentages.”
Forty-seven textbooks have been awarded 2026 Textbook Awards by the Textbook & Academic Authors Association (TAA) Awards Committee. Twelve textbooks received William Holmes McGuffey Longevity Awards, 11 textbooks received Most Promising New Textbook Awards, and 24 textbooks received Textbook Excellence Awards.
Published academic book author and futurist Bryan Alexander will present the 2026 Michael Sullivan Lecture Keynote, “How the AI Revolution is Impacting the Future of Textbook & Academic Publishing,” at the Textbook & Academic Authors Association’s 2026 TAA Institute for Textbook and Academic Authors on Friday, June 12.
For those whose works are included in the historic copyright infringement settlement, Bartz v. Anthropic, the official notice with your unique ID should be arriving near the end of November. Join Brenda Ulrich, an attorney with Archstone Law, and TAA Executive Director Kim Pawlak on Wednesday, December 10 from 2-3 p.m. ET, for a special webinar, “Bartz v. Anthropic: An Update on the Claims Process for Textbook & Academic Authors:.” Learn how your unique ID will help you when filing claims, as well as other updates on the claims process and TAA’s recommendations for textbook and academic authors whose works are included in the settlement.
What happens when a veteran mathematics textbook author and a leading AI scientist exchange ideas on the future of textbook publishing? In anticipation of his namesake keynote at TAA’s 2025 Virtual Textbook & Academic Authoring Conference, Michael Sullivan connected with Gerald Friedland—textbook author and AI Scientist at Amazon AWS—for a thoughtful conversation on artificial intelligence, authorship, and the evolving landscape of academic publishing. Friedland will expand on these ideas in his session, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Textbook Publishing: Opportunities and Challenges,” on Friday, June 6, from 9–10 a.m. ET.
By Dave Harris
Is there is a danger that LLMs (or other AI) will create an “uber-textbook” using the work of individual authors, basically stealing the best of all the individual work of scholars for profit, while paying the authors nothing? This question came up in the November 6, 2024 TAA Conversation Circle on royalties, and I wanted to touch on it again, after writing a related piece this past spring.
The previous piece argued (1) that current AI is too limited to do good intellectual work, and, (2) regardless of the capability of AI, that it’s important to take one’s own interests, desires, and personal experience into account because writing and research are personally uplifting positive experiences worth having, even if you’re not necessarily selling your work.
