Amazon boycotts are gaining more widespread attention as some people seek ways to protest the growing influence of billionaires in government and public life. - Wisconsin Public Radio
The tariff documents include an annex listing exempt items, among which are listed “printed books, brochures, leaflets and similar printed matter.” The tariffs could, however, affect the supply of materials and equipment, and no one seems assured that the exemptions will be accepted or that there won’t be further tariffs. - The Bookseller (UK)
“Cúirt is the time when all of us grassroots people get to celebrate literature and writing in our own city. ... Writers are very generous with what they share: they don’t hedge or hold anything back.” - Irish Times
“You can only make jokes about an enemies to lovers romance novel about two rival realtors who are also randomly immortal werewolves just trying to live a normal life in the mortal world if you’ve actually read said novel.” - LitHub
The problem is in the evaluators, not the kids: “‘Code-mixing, or using two languages in the same sentence, is often interpreted as confusion. It's actually a ‘normal part of bilingual development,’ and even a sign of ‘bilingual children's ingenuity,’ according to the researchers.” - NPR
Four of the Big Five publishers—Hachette Book Group, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster—and Sourcebooks sent a letter to Congress on April 3 expressing “deep concern” over the state of the nation’s libraries following a week of unprecedented turmoil at the Institute of Museum and Library Services. - Publishers Weekly
“Picador, the paperback arm of FSG, will embark on ... the trade paperback reissue of all 75 Inspector Maigret novels over a three-year period starting in spring 2025. Reissues of 30 of his standalone psychological noirs — which Simenon himself called romans durs, or ‘hard novels’ — will follow beginning in winter 2026.” - Publishers Weekly
Fandom has long facilitated deep dives into media in which fans analyse, discuss and track their favourite storylines and character arcs. This has been particularly true of the science fiction and fantasy genres, due to their complex and expansive narrative universes. - The Conversation
Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation's bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. - Ars Technica
As a professor of computer science who has authored hundreds of works on artificial intelligence, including AI textbooks that cover social impact of large language models, I think understanding how the models work can help writers and educators consider the limitations and potential uses of AI for what might be called “creative” writing. - The Conversation
Giving away books for free might seem counterproductive, but it’s one of the best ways to get readers invested. Once they finish one book, they’re more likely to purchase another. More importantly, it helps trigger Amazon’s algorithms, increasing a book’s visibility long after the free period ends. - Jane Friedman
“The nonprofit behind National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, has announced that it is shuttering. The closure follows a period of turbulence which included disputes over the organization’s stance on AI and its content moderation, as well as what NaNoWriMo described in an announcement as financial challenges.” - Publishers Weekly
The most recent crop of words added to the Oxford English Dictionary is notable for terms from Southeast Asia: from the Philippines, gigil (that feeling when something is so adorable you want to squeeze it hard) and videoke (video karaoke), and from Malaysia and Singapore, alamak (something like WTF). - The Guardian
Altman wrote that the model “got the vibe of metafiction so right.” But that’s like saying that Trump Tower gets the vibe of Versailles so right. Or that Mark Zuckerberg gets the vibe of human so right. - The Drift
