“Traces of ink lettering visible in the X-ray images” — virtually unrolled and scanned for words by a specially-designed AI program — "revealed the text to be part of a multi-volume work, On Vices, written by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus in the first century BC.” - The Guardian
“President Donald Trump on Thursday fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress — the first woman and first African-American to hold the position. She was informed of the decision in a terse, two-sentence email.” - The Washington Post (Yahoo!)
“Some authors say they're out thousands of dollars after carting books and merchandise to Baltimore for the event” — A Million Lives Book Festival — “and not being able to recoup the costs. … “(Organizer) Archer Management has since apologized for the entire event and stated that refunds are being processed automatically.” - CBC
Here’s what happens when the Pulitzer board either (a) considers none of the three finalists submitted by the jury in a category a worthy winner or, as in this case, (b) can’t find consensus on a single choice among the submitted finalists. - The New York Times
Management began reviewing all store materials after receiving a complaint from a customer against profanity on a greeting card. What began as a purge of purportedly profane materials, including greeting cards, stickers and book titles with swear words, quickly escalated into the quiet removal of more than 60 books from the store. - NBCNews
Percival Everett’s James continued its run of awards with the fiction prize, while Benjamin Nathans’s To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause won for nonfiction, Tessa Hulls’s Feeding Ghosts won for autobiography, Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems won for poetry, and Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing won for biography. - Publishers Weekly
The library records more than 180,000 annual visits, one of the highest figures in Alabama, in a city of 25,000. It has been called Fairhope’s Taj Mahal. Now, it is also a battleground. Residents have packed meetings of the City Council and the library board, debating books with sexual content or L.G.B.T.Q. themes. - The New York Times
The news hardly comes as a surprise, given the judge’s inclination to rule against the IMLS shutdown. The temporary restraining order was issued just days ahead of a mass layoff of nearly all IMLS employees that was slated to take effect on May 4. - ARTnews
Are male novelists actually in decline? Some metrics certainly say so: of all the writers to appear on the weekly Sunday Times bestseller lists for fiction hardbacks so far this year, just a third are men. - The Guardian
“As children write less and less by hand, we wanted to explore the impact of this on alphabetic and orthographic skills. In other words, we wanted to see whether the ability to learn letters and to assimilate and remember word structure develops differently through manual training or the use of keyboards." - PsyPost
Some say that what makes the difference between human and machine writing—and what taints the latter—is that machines do not think, or intend, or mean. Their compositions, allowing that they do compose, are therefore not minded or mindful, and it is this lack that gives them their taint, as properly it should. - The Lamp
“The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature… was established (to provide) translations of literary works written in Chinese from the Zhou dynasty (circa 1046–256 BCE) to the end of the last empire, the Qing, in 1911, … (in) translations that are scholarly (without detracting) from the pleasure of reading.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
Due to the advent of online self-publishing platforms, what once required a team of professionals—editors, graphic designers, and formatting specialists—can now be done with just a few clicks. - The Future of Things
“There are two books they are leaving (in the teen section). There are some people not happy about that decision. They feel there is sexually explicit content in them. But our library board has reviewed that and didn’t feel that way.” - Alabama.com
Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will use AI to build new features that “remove technical barriers,” allowing editors, moderators, and patrollers tools that allow them to accomplish what they need to do, without worrying about how to “technically achieve it.” - TechCrunch
