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Library On The US/Canada Border Gets A Door On The Canadian Side

For decades, people in Stanstead were allowed to walk around the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, but last year the U.S. limited access. Instead of walking a few metres, you’d have to drive down the street and go through a border crossing just to get in the front door. - CTV

In Praise Of Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting has an undeservedly bad reputation. Even without AI, some readers feel betrayed if the name on a book’s cover doesn’t tell the whole story. - The Atlantic

U.S. Court Of Appeals Rules That Iowa’s School-Library-Book-Banning Law May Stand

“In a blow to the freedom to read in the United States, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that a controversial 2023 Iowa law … can go into effect, reversing a lower court decision and sending the case back for a third hearing.” - Publishing Perspectives

Eco-Dystopian Novels From Africa And Asia Push The Form

Speculative and futuristic visions of environmental calamity are being imagined globally through environmental fiction. Eco-dystopian novels can help people process their fears or mourn the loss of a more stable climate. - The Conversation

The Market For Non-Fiction Reporting In Books Is Contracting

These developments suggest a rough future for a certain kind of writing: nonfiction that’s based on reportage more than on personal experience or celebrity—a.k.a. long fact, literary nonfiction, or narrative nonfiction. - The New Republic

Does There Even Need To Be A Separate New York Times Magazine Anymore?

In ink-on-dead-trees print, sure. But a large majority of the newspaper’s readers consume the Times online or on an app, where the difference between the magazine’s articles and those of the regular newspaper is barely visible. - New York Magazine (MSN)

Fact-Checker Jasper Lo On His Illegal Firing From The New Yorker

“Why me? I wondered. I had finished my three-year term as the first vice chair of the New Yorker Union the week prior. Condé Nast had violated our collective bargaining agreement and broken labor law dozens of times, but it had never attempted something as reckless as illegally firing union leaders.” - The Nation

How Two Recent AI Publishing “Scandals” Will Changing The Books Industry

Stories like Shy Girl and The New York Times’ profile of AI romance author Coral Hart, who boasted of using AI to write and self-publish 200 hundred books across 21 pen names, demonstrate that theoretical disputes did not prepare us to be confronted with the reality of AI. - The Conversation

Book Science And The Art Of Preserving Old Books

Book scientists are working tirelessly with an array of technologies — including microscopes, multispectral imaging and artificial intelligence — to recover, understand and preserve many valuable ancient texts. - The Conversation

Trump’s Presidential “Library” Is A Grift

The design language is neither stately and trim in the Republican mode, nor bold and innovative, as preferred by Democrats. It is, instead, generically contemporary, a glass tower struggling for some kind of distinctive shape or symbolic form, like so many towers built in Dubai or China. - Washington Post

How Do We Police AI In Writing?

Although I don’t buy the claim that AI is “inevitable” in some theoretical sense, I also feel like the current incentives in media and publishing, as Max Read recently argued, make it highly unlikely it won’t be used by some writers at some stage of the writing process. - The Third Hemisphere

Is The Vice President Trying To Use His Book Titles To Squash The Books Of Bell Hooks?

No, you can’t “steal” a book title, but this is … hm, interesting. - LitHub

How That Guy Is Reshaping The English Language

“The president uses verbs to evade responsibility and even proclaim a new form of leadership. Perhaps surprisingly, this is true even when Mr. Trump is proudly, if also prematurely, declaiming military successes.” - The New York Times

HarperCollins Partners With AI Company For Animation

HarperCollins has announced a multi-year partnership with Toonstar, an “AI-powered” animation studio, to adapt a slate of the publisher’s titles into original YouTube series. - Publishers Weekly

A Crisis In Writing? Let’s Consider It Historically

For the first 40,000 years of its existence, it was simply an abstract symbolic system to process complex data; only in the last 3,000 years did mankind acquire the strange notion that these sign-systems might correspond to the grunts and gurgles they used for everyday communication. - Unherd

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