S5E18 Books, Bots, And The Battle For Credit: Julie Trelstad

A quiet revolution is underway in publishing, and it’s not just about formats. We dive into how AI is reshaping discovery, licensing, and authorship with Julie Trelstad of Amlet, a rights registry built to make books machine-recognisable—so creators can be identified, consent can be captured, and royalties can actually flow. From the surge of AI-generated lookalikes to landmark lawsuits over scraped libraries, we trace how the industry arrived at this moment and what a fair, practical path forward looks like.

Julie breaks down the crucial difference between input and output licensing, why ISBNs and legacy metadata fail modern systems, and how the ISCC standard enables a robust digital fingerprint for each work—down to paragraphs and images. We talk candidly about fear in the creative community, the flood of bland AI prose, and the very human qualities that machines tend to erase: voice, quirk, and risk. Along the way, we share hands-on advice for authors using AI: practise discernment, slow the process, maintain a single brief, and edit with intent. Treat the model like an eager intern—helpful, fast, but never the author.

Looking ahead, we imagine AI-native discovery where books, audiobooks, and summaries live inside conversational interfaces—and attribution becomes a visible badge of trust. With transparent licensing and machine-readable rights, micro-royalties for model usage become possible, piracy loses its edge, and independent creators gain leverage. If ebooks taught us to distribute better, AI is our chance to account better and to value the people behind the pages.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow and subscribe, share with a friend who writes or reads obsessively, and leave a quick review to help others find the show. Your support helps us bring more smart, human-centred conversations about AI and creativity to your feed.

Transcript

Setting The Stage: AI And Books

Stephen King 0:02

And welcome back. We're here for a new episode of The Incongruent. And this is really, really exciting episode as we we really build on this human AI interaction talking about stories that people really want to hear about AI. And joining me today, I have my sage voice. Sage voice, Imnah.

Imnah Varghese 0:23

Hello, I am the Sage.

Stephen King 0:26

Yes. Just because she she she she I name Imnah the Sage Voice because apparently she knows a lot more than me. So there we so there we go. Yes, yes, yes. And she's also about this particular topic indeed because she's actually an author, and today we're talking about books, aren't we, Imnah?

Imnah Varghese 0:44

We are, and stop telling everybody that I'm an author, Steve. I don't have any published anything out there, but watch the space. Maybe someday that might change. But also very interestingly, um, we went ahead and spoke to Julie Trelstad.

Stephen King 0:59

Julie Trelstad is the US a publishing lead for a company called Amlet, which is like Hamlet without the H. Yeah, because apparently uh you'll find out the secret for that later on in the episode if you listen carefully. So uh Julie is joined this AI registry, uh, which helps to protect authors' rights and uh copyrights and and does it all for books, which is I think is very fantastic, isn't it, right, Imnah?

Imnah Varghese 1:27

It is indeed very fantastic, and I think it um in a world where we are rushing headstrong into AI, and uh basically the question of who owns what has everybody dumbfounded and confused and future creators even hesitant to put their stuff out there for fear of it being stolen, Amlet is honestly going to be its saving grace. Um, and so it was really insightful to have that conversation with her. And I think I'm personally super excited to see where that goes in the future. Um, because regulatory um AI is something that we've talked about before, and I think will continue to be a theme throughout future episodes as well.

Stephen King 2:07

Yes, it will. So if everyone's ready for this, get ready. And here we go.

Meet Julie And Amlet’s Mission

Imnah Varghese 2:15

Hello, everybody, and welcome back for another week of incongruence. It's um the chaotic duo once again. It's Stephen Imna, and today we are joined by the amazing Julie Trelstadt. She's currently the founder of Amlet AI. Um, and we're gonna be talking books today. We've had all sorts of different interesting topics in the last few weeks, and uh, this might just be my personal favorite. I um also personally really enjoy writing um and dabbling in it. I can't really say anything to how good the writing is, but Julie, we are so excited to talk to you today. Um, so can you tell us first off a bit about yourself and a bit about Amlet AI? What exactly is it?

Julie Trelstad 2:59

Well, I I want to clarify too that I'm not the founder, I'm the head of the US publishing at Amlet. And um, and my co-founders are in Milan and in Germany. Or I'm not the co-founder, they are in Milan and Germany. I have been working in uh book publishing for over 30 years, and I started out, actually studied architecture, but then I acquired and edited architecture books for 15 years before I became more of a generalist. And um in the early 2000s, I insanely started my own publishing company, which went out of business as soon as Borders in the United States went out of business.

Julie Trelstad 3:33

Um, but since then I've really been working in the digital space. I've done digital rights at the Literary Agency. I've been helping authors move through the birth of self-publishing and becoming independent authors and also taking advantage of the other technologies. Um now I can't be, you know, I'm so excited to be working in AI and publishing because, but from a very human perspective, like how is AI going to help human authors um get paid and for their work and also to have a wider reach.

Imnah Varghese 4:08

Fantastic. So how did you really end up um with the AMLET AI? How did it all begin? Did you just wake up one day and think, hey, why not AI influence? Why not AI?

Why Books Are Invisible To Machines

Julie Trelstad 4:18

You know, it really came out of like the the co-founders are in Europe and it came out of largely, um, and it's interestingly, they're both book and coders at the same time, and they realized that books were invisible to the AIs, to search systems. Um ISBNs, which are the book identifiers, are not recognizable. Copyright is not machine recognizable, none of it is. So there was no easy way for developers or even software itself to interface with books.

Julie Trelstad 4:51

And then through the European Union has the Copyright Act that requires any developer or programmer to pay authors and creators for their work, yet there was no way to document this. And so it was a complete mismatch between what the uh software wanted to do and what authors could do.

Julie Trelstad 5:13

So, you know, I've always been bugged by the fact that you can't look up an ISBN and get the book. Like there's really no connection. Um, so there's no, that's exactly where it came out of between that need and the and the EU regulations.

Stephen King 5:27

So I have a similar problem because one of my a couple of my papers are published in ISBN conference proceedings. And it's so hard even using the ISBN databases to to find them and where they come up with. So I I I feel the pain there. Now, you've seen publishing reinvent itself multiple times.

Julie Trelstad 5:45

Yes.

Stephen King 5:46

Uh what parallels do you see between uh early digital publishing revolution? You you mentioned uh uh when Borders uh just went out of business.

Julie Trelstad 5:58

Yeah, that that was happening at the same time as Amazon was was on the rise. So um I think that you know the major thing is almost like these things happened at the same time. So ebooks came along in the early in the 90s, um, Amazon came up, but the other thing that was happening in the 1990s was this massive consolidation of the major publishers.

Julie Trelstad 6:19

In the United States, we went from having over a hundred sort of robust medium to large size publishers today, where we only have five large ones and maybe 20 that are, you know, sort of moderately sized. So there was like this, and and it was really, I think it has to do with a lot of market forces and technology and the way businesses were run, you know, there everything was mergers and acquisitions.

From Ebooks To AI: Industry Parallels

Julie Trelstad 6:42

And so the industry got smaller. At the same time, the new technology with ebooks allowed authors to become independent and anyone just you know to have a very low cost of entry to publish a book by publishing an ebook or using print-on-demand technology where you can just upload the PDF and it'll get printed to order instead of having to have a huge amount of inventory.

Julie Trelstad 7:04

That was hugely disruptive, and that was like 20, 20 some years ago. Um, and I can I think that this is very similar because it's all of a sudden um publishers had before the 1990s not um even had rights to sell ebooks. So when ebooks became available, anything that was published before 1991 um was fair game.

Julie Trelstad 7:28

And so Amazon KDP Publishing sucked up a bunch of them, a few other publishers or um enterprising just bought all these ebook rights up, leaving the publishers flat footed. And I think this so what's happening in AI now is that we think that within 10 years or even sooner, all of your books are gonna be sort of within an AI container. I don't know exactly what that looks like, but they'll be discovered by that. And um these explicit rights to how AIs can use your books is in nobody's contract right now. So it's sort of setting off a whole new race to how are authors gonna get paid, who's gonna be the one to really monetize the situation.

Stephen King 8:11

We're looking at something like a a Netflix for books, it's all right. Uh and with the technology, we're gonna be able to have all the different affordances, so you're gonna have audiobooks in there as well, I suppose. Uh, and uh you're already seeing in things like Notebook LM how it's able to turn very complicated texts into uh videos. So uh you're gonna have a lot of funky things going on there. Uh but what was the moment or the main problem that you thought? Thank you, Amazon.

Julie Trelstad 8:46

There it is. Amazon.

Stephen King 8:49

Curse you, Amazon. Curse you, Amazon. We can edit this down, that's good. So uh but what was the moment or the problem that convinced you that we needed an AI registry to fix this?

Julie Trelstad 8:59

Well, you know, it's exactly that. That's like Spotify. It's like people can't get paid.

Piracy, Lawsuits, And Licensing Deals

Julie Trelstad 9:03

And I think for me, it really came to bear with um when we learned about the massive piracy that was happening, that um that these AI companies, as I said, they they didn't know that they couldn't find an easy way to get a hold of these books. And so they went to piracy databases and they just sucked them all in. And then they like the lawsuits, the the Claude lawsuit, the Anthropic lawsuit was settled for what, $1.8 billion, affording approximately $3,000 per book that was scraped. Um, in the after, in the after fact.

Julie Trelstad 9:38

Um, but publishers are now beginning to make deals. The larger those five publishers are making deals with the AI companies to license their work. Um, but there's no but there is there's no standard for it. There's no easy way. So AMLET is a registry that will allow you to create a digitally recognizable fingerprint of your work so that um they don't have to pirate it. They can just, you know, pay you or know that it belongs to you and know who to send the check to.

Imnah Varghese 10:10

That's really interesting. Um, because you know, many authors also feel that AI will steal their voice. And this is kind of almost a practical example of that happening. Um, so from your perspective, what does that really look like in practical terms to ethically harness AI in this industry? Like what does that really mean for publishers and creators?

Julie Trelstad 10:33

For publishers and creators, I mean, there's really two things we're looking at here, terms of what AI is doing with books. There's sort of input, which is like when the LL models are being built, they just like eat massive amounts of books, you know, just like swallow it whole. And then they make mathematical equations of it that's input licensing, and it's not necessarily recognizable to an author, right? In order to get something that is recognizable, you would have to say, I would like, you know, you prepped uh prompt it and say, I would like to write a book in the style of my favorite romance writer. And and then it does. And that is what we would call output, right? So there is a significant similarity between the output of this work, and if somebody were to go publish it and it was say 90% similar or 80% similar to this other writer's work, and using AMLET you'll be able to identify like the level of similarity between somebody's output and yours. And I think if you look at sort of the Disney lawsuits where they're saying like the AI art is looking, geez, a lot like Disney characters, and your eyes can even recognize that, that's from the output, not you know, the input is there in a big soup, but it's only the fact that somebody would output a character that is otherwise copyrighted or so close to a character that it's it's a problem.

Input Vs Output: Defining AI Use

Imnah Varghese 12:00

Interesting. So um, if large language mod models then need to get better at imitation, then what really is left for the human side of things? What's distinct about that in terms of storytelling and even editing, really?

Julie Trelstad 12:16

Well, you know, it's what is interesting is that AI doesn't like things that are weird or quirky or creative. Like, you know, if you like ask it, you know, if you kind of like you're a very creative writer and you have a very distinctive voice, um, and you ask the AI to like edit, you will like smooth it all out and try to make it sound like everybody else. Um, I think that that sort of unique individuality, you know, is something that individual authors have. It comes out in their voice, it comes out in their tone. Um, and that if it is a distinctive voice, you know, you don't who wants to copy that? Because everyone wants their own distinctive voice, I suppose. You don't necessarily want to sound like somebody else. Um yeah.

What Humans Do Best: Voice And Weirdness

Imnah Varghese 13:02

Yeah. I mean, honestly, that reminds me of uh this essay that I was typing up this week, and Grammarly just kept trying to change everything I wrote, and it was driving me absolutely insane. Um, and if I had accepted all of those changes, I think by the end of it, my essay would have looked like something straight out of Chat GPT. Um, and so I can see now why a lot of universities are actually forbidding the use of generative AI completely when it comes to certain creative modules where you have to really think about things for yourself, write your own perspectives where you're coming from. And that is really what you're being assessed on. It's not something that can be artificially created or put together by another man or machine. That just would not make sense. Um, and so thinking about the people in the industry, you've also built a massive network yourself. Um, so if you could just put up some feelers and look at the um kind of the general way that AI is being received in the industry right now, what would you say it is? Are people panicking? Do they think they're gonna lose their jobs, or are they kind of inviting this new change out of curiosity?

Julie Trelstad 14:14

I would say all of the above, but the general feeling in books and literature is that AI is the devil. I mean, I've certainly I've gotten some like I've been trying to reach out to some people, especially the small presses, literary, you know, the very high, high, high creatives, um, express the the same thing that you were saying, too, that it is really going to destroy us, it's gonna destroy writing. And yeah, it's it does make writing easier, but it doesn't make it better.

Julie Trelstad 14:40

Um, and then, you know, in the larger sense, like piracy is a big problem. Like the major publishers put out a book. I I was talking to an author recently who published a book in September, and by October, there were five copies of the book written by AI, no discernible author competing with her book on Amazon.

Julie Trelstad 15:02

Um, so like this is a you know, trying to clamp down on this and these imitators that seem so like legit until you look under the cover a little bit. Um yeah, that's that's a big problem. But people, you know, in the industry are looking at opportunities as well.

Sentiment In Publishing: Fear And Opportunity

Stephen King 15:21

So I I I've seen similar things and I've experienced similar things. I've come and approached a graphic designer who was very young, uh, just about Imner's age. Uh and she was very hostile towards the whole idea of me bringing AI. Being the devil is the correct thing. I was on a call earlier this week on Monday where the lecturer uh was giving uh a talk to one of the Swedish schools, and uh he was telling us all how to resist AI in ed tech. It was the same kind of thing. Uh and I've just published this morning 20 reasons why people are concerned about AI on my LinkedIn page, and I could have gone further and further. Um but I use AI for doing some creative literature work. You do too. I do. I uh and I produce uh a desktop role-playing game, and I'm trying to produce something for Kickstarter, uh, and I'm using for images, and I'm helping it to meet with the rules, and and I'm and I'm plugging in there's a lot of my input that goes into this. Exactly. Uh and and when it comes out, I'm editing it and I'm formatting everything and I'm making it look beautiful and playtesting it all. So um and and I can't and I don't see any problem with it. But I think the the reason that I don't see problem is because I I've grown up when I've become mature in the usage. So if you were teaching someone to get used to AI, like one of these people, what is the one AI literacy skill you think people should be taught so that they can they can operate in this is future? Because AI is not going anywhere.

Julie Trelstad 16:55

Yeah, and I I actually work with authors and and we use a lot of AI in in our marketing practices, and the thing we talk about a lot is discernment. And, you know, the one thing that I am doing more of with my AI is slowing it down.

Julie Trelstad 17:09

Uh, you know, I even give it instructions to like give me one piece at a time. Because what I'm finding is that like it goes so fast and um that I can't, you know, it's so easy to just answer that next. Oh, would you like me to do this report? Would you like me to continue this? And uh it's it's more like um, you know, be very deliberate in the way that you're using it.

Julie Trelstad 17:31

And then, you know, the one more tactical thing that I would teach sort of in the same thing is to create your one master prompt file so that you have your, you know, your instructions so you keep yourself and the AI literally on the same page. Like it's just a one-page document that that contains all the objectives that you want to achieve and that you use that and keep editing that and remind it, and use it when you start a new chat, if it's for a particular project.

Practical AI Literacy: Discernment And Pace

Stephen King 18:01

That's really clever. So that's like managing the AI as if you would manage, like they say, a a very keen but inexperienced intern, right? That's what you do. This is my checklist of things. Have you done it? Check it off. Yeah, brilliant.

Julie Trelstad 18:15

And slow down.

Stephen King 18:17

Slow down. Um I agree. I mean, uh, I in one of my other talks, uh, when I do this, uh it's it's a it's a big incentive for you to spend money on new things because it does go so quickly that the roadblock becomes a paywall somewhere, firewall somewhere, uh, and you have to pay to get through that uh through that wall. And because the AI has got you there so quickly, you feel like you don't want to you you're running with it. You don't want to slow the AI down. So you end up rather than waiting, you end up spending a bit more money to it rather than waiting for the next day for the for the new credits to come through. Um so yeah, slowing down is is a really good option. Uh Imnah, what's next?

Imnah Varghese 18:59

Well, I'm wondering, since we talked about um the threat that AI potentially poses, if it's not really a threat, then um maybe it's a chance to reset the creative economy. So, Julie, what hope do you have that this new phase can actually empower creators and sort of exploit them?

Julie Trelstad 19:20

Yeah, I mean, that's really what's entirely behind AMLET is this concept that authors and creators own their content and they can declare it to any machine or any person. And that if people, if that content has high value, that people will pay for it.

Resetting The Creative Economy

Julie Trelstad 19:38

And, you know, AMLET even allows you to register your book down to the the chunk or the token, like a single paragraph or an image in that. And that so just for that Spotify reason, if an AI uses any piece or portion of that book, that author can continue to get paid. And so, you know, I just think that with information being the currency of the world, that um, you know, being an independent creator and not having your work stolen by, you know, larger entities, but being able to be the one who is completely in charge of who's allowed to use it and for what purposes, and making sure that you get compensated fairly for that transaction.

Stephen King 20:22

I just need to push in on the technology here because you mentioned it at the beginning and you mentioned it again here. Uh is this block is is this blockchain or how how how are you doing this?

Julie Trelstad 20:31

It's it yeah, definitely related to publishers hate that word. But yes, it is a distributed blockchain distributed network. So it's a decentralized um database where uh your information is stored. And the way that AMLET works is it actually creates a digital fingerprint using a standard that was created by one of the founders, the ISCC, which is the International Standard Content Code.

Julie Trelstad 20:59

And what it that does is like you can take your book and it can absorb it and create a code. It doesn't keep all the text, but it creates a unique code so that you can tell if anything is substantially similar to it, even like the French language edition of it is substantially similar to it. The machine can tell that these two things are related, as opposed to like an ISBN, as you say ISBN is manually applied and most people don't fill in the metadata in the ISBN database. So, you know, you have that problem that it doesn't really relate to anything.

Stephen King 21:32

Great. Uh I think that makes perfect sense. Um, but assuming I was an author, or Imnah is an author, she has written her book, she wants to use you. What would be the how would she get involved with Amlet? What would be the first three steps?

Under The Hood: ISCC And Blockchain

Julie Trelstad 21:48

Yeah, you can actually um go to amlet.ai and it's Amlet rhyming with Hamlet because our founder had this literary, he just like didn't want life for authors to end in tragedy. Very cute, but so um, and then you can go, uh currently you can join the wait list, but very shortly you'll be able to register your book on Amlet and you can register for free, or if you wanted the like the bite by bite, paragraph by paragraph, uh currently that's like $29 per title, and your title will be notarized, timestamped, and um defensible in court.

Stephen King 22:26

So how much would it cost? Do you know off the top of your head? We'll edit this up if you don't. Uh have you done the Lord of the Rings and how much would it cost someone to register Lord of the Rings? The three books. If you're Tolkien?

Julie Trelstad 22:39

Yeah, with the whole thing, yeah, just $29 a volume.

Stephen King 22:44

That's it. So three books, three massive books, $29.

Julie Trelstad 22:49

It doesn't matter the length.

Stephen King 22:51

Wow. War and peace.

Julie Trelstad 22:53

Yeah, no, the length doesn't matter.

Stephen King 22:55

Encyclodpedia Britannica. All 20 plus episodes.

Julie Trelstad 23:00

Uh i I mean, what the mon i what you think the registration isn't the big deal. Like the what costs money is the notary and the timestamp.

Stephen King 23:10

Right.

Julie Trelstad 23:11

You know, so like data's it otherwise it's just like creating data, it's just a few, you know, seconds to like create this code. Where where I guess you you want to what you might be asking is how Amlet is gonna make money off this. Um well, no.

Stephen King 23:26

I mean, if you get enough authors to write to put in there, it's on an annual or on a there will be a duration for this, right? It's not gonna be for life.

Julie Trelstad 23:34

Um no, it's for life. The owner the owner of the content owns it forever. You and it's blockchain, so it's non-erasable, right? You know how these ledgers work. You you put an entry in, you never get it out. So once you enter it, um and I and I think actually then the works that you're already citing are already in their public domain, and they you know, they can't necessarily be um amleted.

How Authors Register And Get Paid

Stephen King 23:56

But the intention was they these are they was I I just assumed that it was if you had a small book, it would cost you this much. And if you had a large book, it would cost you a different amount.

Julie Trelstad 24:07

It's true for printing, but not for no. No, but you can make a lot more money when you'd have a lot more tokens included in Tolkien, just to be joking. But yes, more tokens. And so um, you know, what Amlet is going to have is a licensing agency and they will take a percentage on the sales. And it doesn't have to be like anyone out there who wants to start a licensing agency using the Amlet technology that's available too. You can work with our people and and license the technology and run your own licensing agency as well if you have the relationships with these companies.

Stephen King 24:41

Super. Uh okay, well, that's that's that's enough for me. I won't I will stop doing this. I'll stop asking ridiculous questions. Uh that's a good question. Would you like to finish us off with I think we've got one last question then?

Imnah Varghese 24:53

Yeah, we've got one last question, and uh I do also want to commend you for your use of many puns that you've been slipping in. Um and thinking about what's in a name. Uh, do you imagine that the author's name on a book cover will someday mean something different? And maybe AI could shape that in a way.

Julie Trelstad 25:13

I you know, I love that question. I mean, maybe we'll have more like authored by the bot. Um I think, you know, it what's really interesting to me is that authors are more important than publishers. I mean, publishers, like Random House, nobody cares. It was Random House, they care it was this author. And that is always going to matter. But I do think that instead of like an ISBN, or there may still be a barcode, that there will be a symbol on the book saying this is your AMLE or your, you know, your registry.

The Future Of Authorship And Attribution

Imnah Varghese 25:43

Wow. So Amlet there is uh is almost like a verb. Like you also used it as amletted earlier. Interesting. Well, folks, you heard it here first. It was on incongruent, just saying, putting that out there. But thank you, Julie, for your time today. Um, it's been super amazing to talk to you. Um, I think it's very clear that you're really thinking of a future where authors can be protected and um their content can actually be put out there and reach many people without facing the risk of having it stolen by AI, but rather um AMLA is now a way to kind of enforce that creativity with the safeguard rails running alongside it. So that was really insightful, Julie. Um, thank you for your time today. And maybe Steve can post this out.

Stephen King 26:39

Okay. Yes, miss. I will do so. Okay, thank you everyone for listening and tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a thumbs up, a like. Wherever it is possible, please follow us, subscribe. We've got another uh dozen, perhaps new episodes that are gonna come uh in the coming weeks. All of them on fantastic subjects. Uh, if you would like to support the show, we'd be very grateful. There is now a new link there for you to do so.

Editor 27:01

 Last edited, December 31, 2025.