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Big Book Publishers Band Together To Sue Meta Over AI Plundering

Five leading publishers and a best-selling author filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant violated copyright law by training its generative artificial intelligence platform on millions of illegally pirated books and articles. - Washington Post

Publishers And Authors Sue Meta And Mark Zuckerberg (Personally) For AI-Related Copyright Infringement

Five large publishing houses, along with Scott Turow representing authors as a class, allege in their filing that Zuckerberg himself “personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement” of copyrights by Meta, which used countless books and articles to train Llama, its AI language system. - AP

2026 Pulitzer Prizes For Books Go To Jill Lepore, Yiyun Lin, Amanda Vaill, Daniel Kraus, Brian Goldstone, Juliana Spahr

Kraus’s Angel Down took fiction honors; Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us won for general nonfiction; Lepore’s We the People took history honors; Vaill’s study of the Schuyler sisters, Pride and Pleasure, won for biography; Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow won for memoir; Spahr’s Ars Poetica was honored for poetry. - Literary Hub

Mass Author Walkout Imperils Prestigious Australian Publisher

At least 17 authors have ended their contracts with UQP or vowed not to work with the publisher again, after a series of events stemming from responses to the Israel-Gaza war culminated in last week’s cancellation of a children’s book by the Indigenous poet Jazz Money. - The Guardian

How Booker-Nominated Author Katie Kitamura Reads

“Even a book that I know I wouldn’t enjoy now would still be interesting to read, to figure out how both it and I had changed. And there is always the possibility that I would enjoy it after all. Books are always surprising you.” - The Guardian (UK)

The Struggle To Protect Mauritania’s Medieval Library Town

Chinguetti developed as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route to Timbuktu — and, as in Timbuktu, over the centuries Chinguetti families came to amass important collections of medieval manuscripts on religion, law, and science. Now, as the population dwindles and the desert sand encroaches, preserving these collections is a challenge. - The Dial

Idaho Legislature Changes Book Ban As Court Challenges Continue

The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit wrote that HB 710 enables a “system of informal censorship” and potentially “encourages formal censorship through the legal process. The First Amendment does not tolerate either outcome.” - Publishers Weekly

The Guardian Now Has More American Readers Than The Washington Post Has

“(The Guardian) has found a lane in the U.S. news market as a progressive alternative to institutional American media, … backed by a voluntary contribution model that has attracted 700,000 supporters, 500,000 of them recurring. Reader revenue has grown 35% a year for the past two years, with a still-growing 150-person newsroom.” - The Rebooting

Lost Copy Of Oldest Surviving English Poem Turns Up In Rome

“Scholars from Trinity College Dublin uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome. Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century.” - The Guardian

State Legislatures Tweak Library And School Laws Concerning Books (To Protect Them)

“We’ve had success in blue states that want to protect from book banning at the local level, but these efforts have moved to purple or even red states, to the point of Alaska now moving this forward." - Publishers Weekly

“Ghost Imaging” Recovers Text Of 1,500-Year-Old Biblical Manuscript

The 6th-century Codex H included a Greek-language copy of the New Testament's letters of St. Paul. Sometime in the Middle Ages, though, the monks of Mt. Athos broke the book up and re-used the parchment. Fragments have since been identified, but the original text on them was considered irretrievable — until now. - Artnet

Docs: Adelaide Writers Week Sacrificed To Save Arts Festival

Adelaide writers’ week was sacrificed to save the 2026 Adelaide festival, an event that ploughs more than $60m into South Australia’s economy each year, documents show. - The Guardian

How AI Looks Set To Change The Actual Printing Of Books

“A new report from the Book Manufacturers’ Institute on the state of the book industry predicts that printing is on the cusp of potential major changes.” - Publishers Weekly

Did Shakespeare Bring Down McCarthy?

Or was it Kit Marlowe, getting some long-delayed revenge on conservatives in government? - The Atlantic

As Anyone With Literary Chops Knows, This Is A Big Deal

Haruki Murakami has a new novel coming out, and the narrator is … what? A woman?! - LitHub

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