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Meta argues pirated books have no economic value (This week in books)

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This week! Books!

The U.S. Naval Academy’s library has banned books like I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, while Mein Kampf and white supremacist texts remain on the shelves. I wonder why. Twelve students and the ACLU have sued defense secretary Pete Hegseth over the rules, and separately, a new documentary features students in South Carolina who are fighting book bans.

Unfortunately, the madness is being exported. Ella Creamer at the Guardian reports on rising book banning attempts in the U.K. as pressure groups cross the Atlantic.

The mass market paperback is headed for the dustbin of history as a format at the end of this year, and literary agent Richard Curtis penned a “royal funeral” of an obituary.

Tech Tweedle-Dee tweeted “Delete all I.P. laws” and Tweedle-Dum replied “I agree,” which, as Lincoln Michel points out, is pretty rich considering their companies wouldn’t exist without I.P. law. The Jabberwocky, meanwhile, is trying to claim the seven million books Meta pirated to build their A.I. model have no economic value, as the percentage each book represents in the overall model is virtually nil. Curiouser and curiouser…

And in further A.I. book news, author Vauhini Vara profiles Inkitt, a company whose ambitions have grown from being a fan fiction platform to an A.I.-driven publisher and TV studio that, according to CEO Manjari Sharma, hopes to facilitate authors churning out books based on a few bullet points. This is a real quote: ““Everybody’s going to be able to be a writer, right? Imagine if hundreds of thousands of authors could just spitball a few bullet points, and then that bullet point turns into a book. And then they write another bullet point, and that turns out another book. And then suddenly each author is writing 1,000 books.” That doesn’t sound dystopian at all…

It’s no wonder our tech overlords completely miss the point of the science fiction they read.

In more heartwarming news, dozens of residents in a small Michigan town formed a human chain to help their local bookstore move 9,100 books to a new location.

Charlie Jane Anders surveys the rise and fall of YA literature in the zeitgeist, I think accurately ascribing their popularity to the propulsive storytelling voices characteristic of the genre.

And in industry news, agent Alia Hanna Habib has a roundtable with a group of young literary agents, and Lincoln Michel has advice on interpreting royalty statements, some of the most impenetrable documents ever created by the human mind.

This week in bestsellers

Here are the top five NY Times bestsellers in a few key categories. (All links are affiliate links):

Adult print and e-book fiction:

  1. Enchantra by Kaylie Smith
  2. Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez
  3. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros
  4. Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas
  5. Firebird by Juliette Cross

Adult print and e-book nonfiction:

  1. Fahrenheit-182 by Mark Hoppus with Dan Ozzi
  2. Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes
  3. On Democracies and Death Cults by Douglas Murray
  4. Who is Government? edited by Michael Lewis
  5. Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Young adult hardcover:

  1. Our Infinite Fates by Laura Steven
  2. Wings of Starlight by Allison Saft
  3. Rebel Witch by Kristen Ciccarelli
  4. Nothing Like the Movies by Lynn Painter
  5. Heartless Hunter by Kristen Ciccarelli

Middle grade hardcover:

  1. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell
  2. The Complete Cookbook for Young Chefs by America’s Test Kitchen Kids
  3. Wonder by R.J. Palacio
  4. Refugee by Alan Gratz
  5. River of Spirits by Shana Targosz

This week on the blog

In case you missed them, here are this week’s posts:

And keep up with the discussion in all the places!

And finally, on the heels of news that black holes may contain whole universes, some physicists are theorizing that an entire shadow world comprised of dark matter and dark forces could be interacting with ours. Future experiments may hinge, naturally, on vibrations within crystals.

Have a great weekend!

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Photo: The Huntington, San Marino, CA

Reader Interactions

Comments

  2. Neil Larkins says

    I’m too tired to read all of this tonight, but just off the top of my head I’ll say that if Meta pirated books have no value it’s because that’s what pirating does: steals all the value.

  3. Neil Larkins says

    So sad the demise of the paperback. Two memorable works I read in paperback —

    The works of Tolkien, Middle Earth Hobbit to the three Rings.
    The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.