This week! Books! Victoria Strauss at the indispensable site Writer Beware has a new scam to watch for, which starts with a “literary agent” promising to work only on commission who will take your book to the next level, only for additional fees to start rolling in. Be careful out there! Also from Writer Beware, […]
ChatGPT
How to fight book bans (This week in books)
This week! Books! The resurgence of book bans remains distressingly rampant as parents try to control not just what their own kids read, but other kids as well. As Jamelle Bouie notes, what some are calling “parents rights” is really “when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.” Alyssa Rosenberg has some […]
Why are YA sales declining? (This week in books)
This week! Books! News came this week that after years of increasing market share, young adult fiction is now among the only categories posting declines in sales. The #takes have rolled in, and many people cited book bans, a decrease in B&N shelf space for YA, and a lingering lack of diversity. Librarian Karen Jensen […]
No, AI-generated work is not copyrightable (This week in books)
This week! Books! GPT-4 has arrived, leading to all sort of breathless headlines like this one from The Atlantic: ChatGPT Changed Everything. Now Its Follow-Up Is Here. Uhhhh… what exactly has it changed apart from prompting tech types and their financial enablers to lose their collective minds? Longtime readers know I am far from a […]
The Dahl controversy is capitalism not wokeism (This week in books)
This week! Books! Lots of links saved up since the last edition of This Week in Books, so let’s get to it. A controversy erupted over the last few weeks involving Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company creating new editions of Dahl’s children’s novels with updates to some of Dahl’s language with an aim […]
AI gets weird (This week in books)
This week! Books! The blog will go dark for the next few weeks as I take a planned breather (some might refer to this as a vacation). I’m planning to be back in March. Also: My editing slots are booking up extremely quickly this year, so please continue to reach out to me to get […]
