“It’s one of the most mythic icons in American letters — and now the most valuable. The 120-foot-long scroll on which Jack Kerouac hammered out the 1957 Beat Generation classic On the Road has realized an astounding $12.1 million at auction, setting a record for a literary manuscript.” - Artnet
Audiobooks offer significant benefits, primarily increasing reading accessibility, enabling multitasking during daily chores or commutes, and boosting comprehension for auditory learners. - Good E-Reader
Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI’s LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit. - TechCrunch
But what the CEO “failed to mention was that the company wasn’t just dealing with hundreds of furious writers — it was facing litigation as well.” - Futurism
Although the literary novel remains the touchstone for what “elite” cultural status might mean, its former midcentury monopoly on prestige, Brier claims, has been shattered. - LA Review of Books
Literature and mathematics have these strong connections because mathematics is all about structure and pattern. It's the language we use to describe those things. - CBC
Barnes & Noble is experiencing a revival. It opened 60 new stores last year and plans to do the same this year. It is reportedly soliciting banks to handle an IPO. - The Atlantic
“These days the air has a keen edge. A desperate edge. What forms can the imagination take when power seems nonsensical and cruelty deliberate? These questions haunt—and should haunt—our fiction.” - Electric Lit
Jane Austen card decks (themed by book), collaborations with London publishers, old imprints reabsorbed or renamed, and audio - some indie publishers are finding ways to stay alive and even, ina few cases, grow. - Publishers Weekly
A donor “gave $150,000 to the library in honor of her late husband, ... who had been a math professor,” with one catch: the library had to take his library of 1,000 mathematics books. - Oregon ArtsWatch
“Like all big chains, when you shop there, more of your money leaves the community than when you shop at something locally owned. … anything that takes market share from Amazon is positive.” - The Atlantic
It’s not just because of the intensity of the competitors, though that counts for a lot. Stefan Fatsis recounts a contested play at last year’s North American championship and the confusion arising from — let’s call it a breakdown of lexical authority. - Unabridged
By some measures, there are as many as 1 million books published annually in the US, and it’s a number that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down. The result is that there is intense competition for the small slice of the review landscape that remains. - Book Work
“A lost page from the Archimedes Palimpsest, among the oldest sources for the Greek mathematician in existence, has been discovered … at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Blois. The page in question contains geometric diagrams and a passage from Archimedes’s treatise on the sphere and the cylinder, hidden beneath a layer of later religious writings.” - Artnet
