"Just 3% of respondents have personally engaged on the issue — with 2% getting involved on the side of maintaining access and 1% seeking to restrict access. Overall, a solid majority of respondents expressed support for freedom to read and high levels of trust in their local teachers and school librarians." - Publishers Weekly
Even limiting ourselves to literature, it’s simply the case that what endures has minimal correlation to either contemporaneous popularity or contemporaneous acclaim. - Countercraft
The ABA Right to Read Handbook: Fighting Book Bans and Why It Matters … features more than a dozen interviews and profiles, and includes a brief history of book censorship, 'a deep dive into the current book ban crisis,' and 'how-to' guides for organizing at the community level." - Publishers Weekly
The debate is much older than the internet, but in online reading communities such as Goodreads, or on the literary sides of Instagram or TikTok, the acronym “DNF,” for “Did Not Finish,” abounds—as do arguments about when doing so is appropriate. - The Atlantic
“Anthropic has enjoyed enormous financial gain from its exploitation of copyrighted material,” the complaint states, noting that Anthropic projects it will generate more than $850 million of revenue in 2024. “Anthropic’s commercial gain has come at the expense of creators and rightsholders.” - Publishers Weekly
"In response (to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations), major publishers recruited and promoted Black editors and launched new imprints devoted to books by nonwhite authors. Publishing companies said they would diversify their work force. … Four years later, there is a growing sense that the momentum has stalled." - The New York Times
"(The agreement is) to license content from brands including The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Vanity Fair, Wired and Vogue for use within the AI company’s products, including ChatGPT and the SearchGPT prototype." - Variety
"The extensive archive of correspondence and contracts amassed by Orwell’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, … is being offered for sale on the open market, following a decision in 2018 by the publisher’s parent company to sell the archive because the warehouse was closing." - The Observer (UK)
Of course, selling books is as much a business as selling grill brushes. But the gross margins are small, and bookstore owners tend to be what the sociologist Laura Miller calls “reluctant capitalists.” - The New Yorker
Unsurprisingly, the arrival of fully fledged generative AI has done nothing to improve the situation for commercial translators. But there’s no impact on literary translators, right? Wrong. - Eurozine
The dilatoriness that used to be such a feature of the literary world in the days when it relied on the postal service and the telephone has, you suspect, been somewhat allayed by the forward march of technology. - The Critic
Ingram's filters had mistakenly identified the book as having been generated using AI—a mistake indicative of the AI moment we now find ourselves in. - Publishers Weekly
“During the Renaissance, no translator had to apologize for following her instincts to champion the work of one of the most extraordinary, under-recognized writers of her time. Oh how the mighty have fallen?” - Three Quarks Daily
Jason Diamond: "I’ve often heard this discussed as some existential problem that might be impossible to tackle, as if people have thrown up their hands and agreed that, yup, men and fiction just don’t mix. I’m perplexed by this, … and I’ve come to the conclusion we’re going about fixing things all wrong." - GQ
