“Under the name of his alter ego, MC Grammar, Mitchell has become a wildly popular performer whose rhymes have made reading and grammar all the rage among young people across Britain.” - The New York Times
Wait, don’t lick that bright green cover - which probably contains arsenic. “Since the project launched five years ago, Tedone's team has cataloged more than 300 books containing the pigment, a figure that's likely just a drop in the ink pot.” - NPR
“Amanda Jones is a Louisiana middle-school librarian who sleeps with a shotgun under her bed and carries a pistol when she travels the back roads” thanks to right-wing attacks on books - and now her. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
She was labeled a “sicko, pig, trash,” she writes in the memoir. "The sense of betrayal was overwhelming." One message was particularly alarming: “Continue with your LGBT agenda on our children cause we gunna put in the dirt very soon ... You can’t hide." - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
In the 20th century, the word lost its hint of the macabre as its meaning became something quieter. “Weird” now means peculiar — perhaps passingly so, but against what one would expect. - The New York Times
"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
