Searches on Amazon — estimated to control at least half of all U.S. book sales, and an even bigger share of the growing e-book market — are increasingly turning up mediocre AI-generated titles filled with unreliable information and soggy prose. - Axios
"Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the future, then creativity might be possible. I view this possibility with a certain dreadful fascination." - The Atlantic
Josh Cook: "People use books to develop their morals, support and test their belief structures, come to conclusions about the state of the world, and make voting decisions. … Person to person, display to display, event to event, book sales have a real opportunity to shape … a more sustainable world." - Esquire
"But a new analysis by BookScan shows that BookTok's effect on sales is diminishing. The most notable sign of that softening came in July, when, for the first time, sales from the roughly 180 BookTok authors BookScan follows fell compared to the prior year." - Publishers Weekly
"For me, generative AI has been instrumental in tasks that previously demanded hours of effort. It’s helped me create engaging and targeted marketing copy in a fraction of the time than before, allowing me to customize and iterate on messaging manually in ways that would be nearly impossible without AI assistance." - Publishers Weekly
Rather than the rightness of going after Harry, I was questioning the heat with which I’d done so. I scolded myself: It’s not your comeback. It’s not your mother. For the thousandth time in my ghostwriting career, I reminded myself: It’s not your effing book. - The New Yorker
Over the last decade or so, with the vast expansion of social media networks, a new, seemingly sophisticated language sits on modern society’s tongue. Some call it therapy-speak. Or psychobabble. But despite its prevalence, the language is divisive. - The Guardian
In a sweeping yet forensic 336 pages, “The Great White Bard” argues that “Shakespeare’s texts are a reservoir of what is known as race-making” — how language can define racial identity and establish hierarchy. - The New York Times
And Colleen Hoover is on the bestseller lists because that's what she provides, in every single book she writes, no matter the genre. - The Guardian (UK)
Theft. "Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words." - The Atlantic
The suffix “-ification” (also “-ization”), usually attached to words that end in “-ify,” describes change, the process of something becoming different from what it once was, as in “gentrification” or “globalization” or “Californication." - The New Yorker
"What makes rongorongo so difficult is that ... no one is quite sure whether it is a form of proto-writing or a fully fledged writing system. If the former, are the glyphs pictograms or mnemonic 'cues'? If the latter, is the script ideographic, phonetic, or a mixture of the two?" - History Today
The two pieces, written during an 1863 rebellion by Belarusians and Poles against the Russian Empire, are by Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich, whose books are taught in Belarusian schools, whose plays are still regularly produced, and who has several streets named after him. - BBC
