“Globally, people currently use roughly 7,500 languages, with English, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic and French the most common, counting native and nonnative speakers. That is a lot of languages. But it is a far cry from the peak number historically.” - Reuters (Yahoo!)
The book “Antiquities of Athens,” published in 1858, was returned to the library in the seaside town of Kiama last week by a man who had found it during recent home renovations inside a tea crate bricked into a sealed fireplace, Kiama Library manager Michelle Hudson said. - AP News
“Something’s in the air: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, published last month by FSG, is just one in a recent cluster of genre-spanning books that interpret, adapt, and play with Stein’s legacy, as well as that of her longtime partner Alice B. Toklas.” - Publishers Weekly
“If the odds are against parents who disapprove of artificial intelligence, it’s because there’s an entire ecosystem of AI services designed to insert real children into books … and some relatives can’t resist their ads for specially curated storybooks.” - Wired
The bureaucrat sent an email to him with a dread warning. The books must go, it decreed. There was nothing healthy nor wise in the practice, for the keeping of books on bookshelves is now “the unnecessary storing of combustible materials.” - The Critic
Every time you sit down to write, you’re doing something your brain registers as socially risky. Translating private thoughts into language means exposing yourself to judgment and for most of human history, judgment wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was dangerous. - LitHub
“Freedom Letters … (is) one of a growing number of cultural organizations that have joined forces with bookstores, wholesalers and book-fair organizers to build a literary resistance among the Russian diaspora. Together, they publish, sell and distribute books that can’t get through Russia’s restrictive new censorship laws.” - Bloomberg
I don’t want to totally wave away the issues these pieces are gesturing towards, but I’d argue the fear that we’re sliding into a post-literate society rests on a category error that feels endemic at this point. - Becoming Literary
Before we ask our students to read difficult material, those of us who teach in college owe it to all of them to explain that reading books in their entirety matters. If we won’t, or can’t, then higher education will have a bleak future. - The Conversation
Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404. - Futurism
“Much of the Japanese fiction translated into English fits into broad categories – cats, crime, coffee shops – but one surprise bestseller stands alone. Sales of books by Osamu Dazai, who killed himself in 1948 aged 38, have rocketed in the last few years.” - The Guardian (UK)
“It is important to follow a balanced diet on holiday. … You need to be able to chop and change depending on your mood, which means fiction and nonfiction. And finally, you need to be able to throw all of these rules out of the window.” - The Guardian (UK)
“Covers today are expected not only to attract readers in bookstores, but to circulate fluidly through Instagram posts, TikToks, Substack photos, and carefully curated apartment interiors. Books are now asked to function simultaneously as texts and as lifestyle objects.” - LitHub
