“Until AI, there has been the expectation that no matter what is written in a book, It authored by a person, or people. There needs to be new terms in the social contract between reader and writer.” - Christian Science Monitor
Yes, Americans read less than they did forty years ago—not surprising, considering how many other forms of entertainment and information are competing for our time and attention. But does this spell decline or diversification? - The Bulwark
Like so many of us, I stopped writing letters as I spent more time online. But in the past few years, I’ve begun to see handwritten letters anew, as a form of resistance against the doom and disconnection of our digital lives. - Psyche
In fact, several editions of Homer’s epic have seen enormous increases in sales since Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation came out (with an additional boost for The Iliad), but none more than Wilson’s, which was briefly, last month, the second-bestselling title of any kind in the U.S. - Slate
“Last month, Penguin Random House India, working with Simon & Schuster India, Hay House, and a team of investigators, helped facilitate a police raid on two Delhi sites producing and storing pirated books. One was a full print-on-demand production line … and the other was a warehouse with more than 1,600 pirated copies.” - Publishers Weekly
David Corn gave the Anthropic software a pleasantly meta seven-sentence plot summary as a prompt. Several minutes later, Claude produced a 6,000-word manuscript. Corn replied that that wasn’t novel-length, and Claude served up a narrative eight times as long. Corn: “I’ll cut to the chase: The novel isn’t so bad.” - Mother Jones
Looking at trends in the trade category, which includes religion books, sale rose 2.7% overall to $21.7 billion. The increase was led by religious presses, whose sales rose 9.3%, to $2.2 billion. Adult fiction sales had the second biggest sales increase, with revenue up 3.9%, to $7.1 billion. - Publishers Weekly
Early last year the Giller Prize broke ties with its longtime sponsor Scotiabank — leaving it without the means to support the C$100,000 award and other programs. Now the foundation which stepped up with C$! million in bridge funding has made a C$4 million donation to keep the Giller going longer-term. - The Canadian Press (MSN)
"It speaks about the creative process as though it were something getting in the way of our creativity, slowing us down, rather than being the path that leads us to it. Then again, it’s no surprise that a capitalist venture focuses on the product and speed to market.” - Irish Times
Personal pan pizzas for reading? Yes: “Pizza Hut’s Book It! program is part of the lore of countless childhood readers turned adults. According to Pizza Hut, over 70 million children have participated since the program was founded in 1984, a Reagan-era initiative.” - Slate
“Modern prize culture has existed for about 125 years; James F. English, in his excellent book The Economy of Prestige, dates the current craze for literary awards to the Nobel Prize, which debuted in 1901.” - The New York Times
No, not just The Odyssey. “A new audience is finding poetry, particularly (though not exclusively) through social media: a new generation of poets, particularly but not exclusively performance poets, have come to prominence through Instagram, TikTok, and other short-form video formats.” - The Guardian (UK)
Wasn’t there a compact, for a while, that if you started a book, you’d damn well finish it? “Even lifelong DNFers often feel bad about closing the book — that it’s a sign of a quitter, or that they’re too stupid.” - The New York Times
If languages had all been getting ever easier over all of that time, humans worldwide would just be yelling “ah,” pointing at things and gesturing frantically. Despite occasional appearances otherwise, we are doing better than that. - The New York Times
