James Daunt Would Like You to Know That Barnes & Noble Doesn't Sell AI Books. Probably.

The CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, has a position on artificial intelligence and books, and it is that he doesn't have one. Or rather, he does, but it is nuanced — which, in a media cycle that prefers clean stances, meant the story required several headlines to resolve.

Here is what Daunt actually said: Barnes & Noble takes active steps to exclude AI-generated books from its online catalogue. It demands that publishers label any AI-generated content. It does not knowingly stock AI-generated titles in stores. “We don't sell AI books and don't expect ever to sell them,” he told Publishers Weekly.

And yet. “I have actually no problem selling any book,” he continued, “as long as it doesn't masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn't, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it.” A statement that is, depending on how you read it, either a principled position or a very long caveat.

Daunt's argument is that a blanket ban on AI-generated books would require defining what counts as AI-generated — and that such a definition would be both difficult to establish and potentially a “slippery slope.” This is the same logic used by every industry that wants to avoid making a rule it knows it will eventually have to enforce. The publishing establishment has a long, distinguished history of saying it would never do something and then doing it.

What Daunt described is a situation in which Barnes & Noble doesn't sell AI books because reputable publishers won't publish them. The policy, then, depends entirely on the good behavior of a third party. Which is a policy in the way that hoping for good weather is a policy.

None of this is to say Daunt is wrong. He may be entirely right that the market will sort this out — that readers who want books written by humans will buy books written by humans. The literary ecosystem has absorbed stranger disruptions than this. But the statement, clarified and re-clarified across multiple outlets, should remind us that the places where books are sold are also making decisions every day about what counts as a book. Daunt chose not to make that decision definitively. Perhaps that too is a kind of answer.