The SLF has been sharply critical of Amazon, arguing that it destabilises the book trade. In a statement reported by the Bookseller, it accused the company of seeking “to flood the market with fake AI-generated books, promoted by fake reviews, written by fake readers to the top of fake rankings”. - The Guardian
Ashley Ford needed “a reason to believe that giving myself over to a creative life didn’t also mean condemning myself to poverty and invisibility. What I needed was that constant source of air to turn my spark of creativity into a flame I could share with the world.” - Service 95
“Readers’ increasingly vocal partiality for first-person perspective over third person amounts to a profound shift in taste. Even while publishing is in dire straits elsewhere, the romance genre is in the midst of an unprecedented boom period.” - Slate
Many - most, even - of France's booksellers pulled out of . Then the organizers got Amazon to “mutually agree” to end its sponsorship. Who thought this was a good idea in the first place? - The Guardian (UK)
LitHub explores how platforms like Letterboxd and Goodreads transform intimate cultural experiences into competitive metrics. Because apparently we can't enjoy a book anymore without turning it into content for our personal brand. — Literary Hub
Axel Springer, which owns the German publications Bild and Die Welt and the US website group Politico, will pay £575 million ($766 million) for Telegraph Media Group. Springer intends to “turbocharge” the Telegraph’s expansion into the U.S. marker and to make it “the leading center-right media outlet in the English-speaking world.” - AP
The book is formal and highly structured; it seems like something from another, vaguely bygone time. Still, dictionary editors have long paid close attention to how language is used and perused—in signs, in novels, in articles and pronouncements, and lately on the Web. - The Nation
Historian Ivan Malara spotted notes, annotations and a Bible verse handwritten by the young Galileo circa 1590 in an early printed copy of the Almagest, the second-century C.E. treatise on astronomy by Ptolemy which placed the Earth at the center of the universe. - Smithsonian Magazine
"This idea no machine could ever replace my sensibility, which is so rich, varied, complex, and arising from experience and from history – that’s all rubbish. You can actually manufacture that." - The Conversation
Before ChatGPT made everyone panic about robot poets, writers were already grappling with authenticity's slippery slope. Ghostwriters, collaborators, editors—the literary world's dirty secret is that pure authorship was always a romantic fiction. — LitHub
Bethany Collins spent four months transcribing the 900-odd-page text. She finds many of Melville’s concerns relevant today: “following the lone madman who will take the whole ship down, … overconsumption, the pursuit of oil and an obsession with whiteness.” (Okay, the last one might be a stretch.) - T — The New York Times Magazine
Surely the most dismal prospect is that we will lose sight of our own forms of thinking and understanding if those terms are assimilated to the capacities of AI. - Public Books
A poet is threatening Arts Council England (ACE) with legal action after a magazine it funds withdrew her work from publication based on her “social media presence”, which she believes refers to gender-critical posts. - The Guardian
“Firefighters drilled through the wall of a building behind the structure and entering for minutes at a time, strapped the bookcases together and hauled them backwards to reach the books.” - The Guardian (UK)
