There’s nothing like a Rosetta Stone for the Harappan script (as it’s sometimes called), which developed in and around the ancient cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in present-day Pakistan. Scholars have wide differences about whether the script might ever be deciphered, with or without artificial intelligence. - Live Science
That’s the thing about bad works: they demand talking back to, and unlike the moments of profound inward reflection good works often inspire, we feel better off shouting out loud at the bad ones. - 3 Quarks Daily
A new report has put a figure on the value of public libraries to the community, estimating that they are worth $86.60 in community value per adult per year. - ABC Australia
In response to questions from The New York Times about the A.I. allegations against “Shy Girl,” Hachette told The Times that its imprint Orbit has canceled plans to release the novel in the United States and that Hachette will discontinue its U.K. edition. - The New York Times
James Joyce’s editors compiled a massive list of the book’s errors to be fixed in new editions. Joyce rejected some of the corrections, saying, “These are not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of.” - Smithsonian
The total number of books published in the U.S. in 2025 with ISBN numbers jumped 32.5% over 2024, to more than four million books, according to statistics compiled by Bowker. - Publishers Weekly
“Minutes from six crucial Adelaide Festival board meetings in December and January, obtained by Crikey, give an unvarnished view of how disinviting (Palestinian-Australian author Randa) Abdel-Fattah from the Adelaide Writers' Week in the wake of the antisemitic Bondi Beach terror attack snowballed into a public relations disaster.” - Crikey (Australia)
“(The) chart is set to launch later this year in the UK, offering a monthly rundown of the most popular titles on (the) social media platform. The ranking will combine verified retail sales data with social media engagement. … The charts were first trialled in Germany and are being expanded to the UK.” - The Guardian
“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
