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WORDS

Today In Florida Book-Banning: Dictionaries

"The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle" (the county seat is Pensacola), "has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law." - Popular Information

AI Comes For Comic Book Creators

There is a lot of money involved - the global comic book market is worth an estimated $15.5bn (£12.2bn) a year, while the animated industry is 25 times bigger, at $411bn. - BBC

Eleven Weeks After Hacker Attack, British Library Begins Restoring Online Services

"The British Library is restoring online its main catalogue, containing 36m records of printed and rare books, maps, journals and music scores. … However, access is limited to a 'read-only' format, and full restoration of services provided by the UK’s national library could take until the end of the year." - The Guardian

An Argentine Man Has Spent Two Decades Reviving An All-But-Dead Indigenous Language

His painstaking work with a linguist has produced a dictionary of roughly 1,000 Chaná words. For people of Indigenous ancestry in Argentina, he is a beacon that has inspired many to connect with their history. For Argentina, he is part of an important, if still fraught, reckoning over its history of colonization and Indigenous erasure. - The New York...

The Crisis At Substack Is Of Its Own Making

The company wanted to have it both ways: to exert the cultural influence of a major media company without shouldering any more responsibility (or economic burden) than is expected of a mere service provider, such as Gmail. - The Atlantic

Why Do Taylor Swift Fans Think She Wrote A Mystery In Her Free Time?

Swift obviously doesn't have any actual free time, but anyway: It all comes down a movie trailer and a cat in a backpack, signifying ... something. - Vulture

Go On, Read The End Of The Book First

But by that, we mean the acknowledgements, "where you learn about the temperament of your author, which is sometimes unexpectedly different from that of your narrator." - LitHub

The People Who Love A 24-Hour Marathon Reading Of Moby Dick

At the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, Mass., "the first speaker took the lectern at noon after the strike of eight bells. 'Call me Ishmael,' the famous opening words, sent a ripple of applause through the room." - Slate

Queen Camilla Chooses A Rather Interesting Book For Her Book Club

The author of a book about King Charles and other members of the Royal Family being held hostage says, "the move showed the Queen had 'a fantastic sense of humour.'" - BBC

What The World Of Bestselling Celebrity Books Does To Regular Writers

It isn't pretty: "Publishing is competing with other forms of entertainment in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, and an author with existing name recognition is a tempting prospect." - The Guardian (UK)

The Rise And Spectacular Collapse Of Substack

The issues: "The company wanted to have it both ways: to exert the cultural influence of a major media company without shouldering any more responsibility (or economic burden) than is expected of a mere service provider, such as Gmail.-" The Atlantic

The Hotel That Launched A Million Books

Without a real-life murder mystery at an Indian hotel, Agatha Christie may never have launched Hercule Poirot. - BBC

The Latest Additions To The OED: “Wokeism”, “Screenshare”, “Forever Chemical”, “Chekhov’s Gun”

Both "wokeism" and "wokery" refer to culture war issues, though "wokery" has as a second definition cooking with a wok. Among other terms newly added are "safe word", "talkboard", "PFAS", "Gradgrindian", "taliswoman", "hypnic jerk", and "-splaining" as a suffix ("straightsplaining", "mumsplaining"). - The Guardian

AI Is Great At Creating Personalized Children’s Stories For Your Kids. Here’s The Problem…

The main version of ChatGPT has, since its launch last year, been able to write a children's story, but GPTs allow parents—or anyone, really—to constrain the topic and start with specific prompts, such as a child's name. This means anyone can generate personalized stories starring their kid and their favorite character. Wired

How Consolidation Has Changed Book Publishing

Up to the immediate post-WWII period, publishing was a fairly local, personal business, with houses founded by whiskered men shipping out books to stores on an irregular basis. Today we have the Big Five—HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, and Penguin Random House. - The Bulwark

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