The Indian subsidiary of the publishing giant has withdrawn Sacco’s The Once and Future Riot, an account of the 2013 street battles between Hindus and Muslims in Muzaffarnagar. Sacco says the publisher sent him a list of edits that amounted to “finding excuses” not to release the book. - The Wire (India)
“There are so many bad kids’ books,” Mac Barnett writes, “and kids’ books are bad in so many different ways.” He states that “a big reason for our low opinion of children’s books is simply that lots of children’s books are bad.” - The New Yorker
If, as a French saying has it, “style is the man himself,” what does the style of AI writing tell us about it? For one thing, it has no fixed style, revealing that it has no fixed self. It’s happy to burn tokens saying the same thing in as many ways as you want. - The Atlantic
“The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon.” - LitHub
“I have this daydream where I go to the park and read under a tree. The sun is shining. It's not too hot. The ground beneath me is comfortable. I have snacks on hand, I'm hydrated, and I am captivated by the book in front of me.” - NPR
The fiction award is well-known (as is, in this case, the award winner), but the Women’s Prize added the nonfiction award in 2023 to help redress an imbalance in nonfiction award winners in the UK. - The Guardian (UK)
Can ‘Hot Girls Read’ be trademarked? One creator thought so. “She is using the trademarking this common phrase to retroactively target small businesses who very likely had the idea before her, or at the very least had it around the same time as her.” - Slate
“(The Latin poet) recognized that bees had what we might call social being — co-dependent, organized, enterprising — and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and (willing) to die to defend the colony.” - Literary Hub
“The streamers are newer. They don't have established libraries of ‘80s and ‘90s movies to reboot, and yet they're still looking for familiarity of titles. (Finding hot titles on BookTok to adapt is) one way to compete at an IP level.” - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
“(The Authors Guild research) found that only 25% of print books and e-books read in the past month were bought new or through a paid subscription. ... Average author earnings, now pegged at about $10,000 annually, have declined about 42% since 2009, the year Kindles first entered the market.” - Publishers Weekly
“The retailer, which operates 1,200 outlets globally in airports, railway stations and hospitals, … has already experienced a fall in revenues in its UK airport operation due to the conflict in the Middle East, (and) said North America had now also been affected.” - The Guardian
“The Lord of the Rings author’s translation of a medieval religious text from the early 13th century had lain forgotten in the Bodleian Libraries’ collections until now. His reworking of Sawles Warde, an early Middle English prose homily, which he titled Soul’s Ward ..., is to be published for the first time.” - The Telegraph (UK)
“A sign of the nation’s complete engulfing by war was the presence of so many soldiers on the stages; writers who had become soldiers, soldiers who had become writers. The Russia-Ukraine war has dragged on so grievously, and for so long, that entire publishing cycles have turned since 2022.” - The Guardian
