From Bowdler’s Shakespeare to Puffin’s edited Roald Dahl, publishing has often chosen to smooth away awkwardness rather than explain it. But sanitised texts, missing credits and silent rewrites do more than tidy the past — they erase evidence, authorship and the people who made books possible.

While writing The Short, Strange Life of Dr John William Polidori, I began to see a strange thread running from the machine-breaking of the 1810s to the current fight against AI scraping. The loom, the vampire and the algorithm may seem unlikely companions — but all three raise the same question: who profits when human skill is harvested by someone more powerful?

What happens when decades of creative labour are repackaged as “the start of an idea”? An industry explainer on attribution, acquisition-led growth, and why visible human authorship matters more than ever — especially in the age of AI.

Auteur is not a pretentious relic. It is a lost word of precision — one that distinguishes vision from branding, authorship from automation, and human intention from machine output. In an age of infinite content, clarity matters. David Salariya