News & Notes – 12/07/2024

News & Notes is an occasional Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff

NOTE on paywalls: Publisher’s Weekly and The Guardian may require you to sign up for a free account in order to read their content. Both The New York Times and the Washington Post have paywalls, but allow a small number of free articles per month.

Bookish News

• Trump sues for billions from media he says is biased against him, including CBS, the NYT, and Penguin Random House. (The Guardian) The story first broke in the Columbia Journalism Review, which has additional details not included in the Guardian story. Publishers Weekly also covered the PRH suit. NOTE: If you’re not familiar with 20th-century history, this looks very much like part of the fascist/authoritarian playbook: silence all media criticism by frightening or intimidating them or by making it too costly to continue.
• Florida Moves to Dismiss Publisher Lawsuit Over Book Bans (Publishers Weekly)
• TikTok owner ByteDance to publish print books (The Guardian)
• Tech companies, once again, are trying to do publishing. (Literary Hub) The article covers Microsoft’s new imprint as well as the ByteDance announcement mentioned above.
• Harper St. George announced that her publisher has “declined to buy more historical romance from me despite my books earning out.” She indicated that she’s not the only historical author experiencing this. (Harper St. George, in reply to a post on Threads)
• For AI-related news, see below.

AI (“artificial intelligence”)

• HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors’ Work to AI Company (404Media). An article on LitHub confirms this, with screenshots of an email sent by the publisher to author Daniel Kibblesmith. The Guardian later covered the story in an article, giving additional information.
• Dutch publisher to use AI to translate ‘limited number of books’ into English (The Guardian)
• This tech company [Spines] wants to use AI to publish 8000 books next year. Is this a bad sign for book publishers? (Commotion, CBC) You can read an edited transcript of the interview or listen to it in its entirety.

Worth Reading/Viewing

• A Modest Request for a Little More Genre Chaos (Molly Templeton, Reactor)
• Adriana Hererra on traditional publishing’s declining investment in historical romance (on Threads)
• Romance on the screen and on the page: Two Indicators (NPR’s Morning Edition, from Planet Money; podcast) Two stories, back to back: the first is on the made-for-TV romcom, and the second is on the success of the romance genre in publishing.
• TikTok meets Tolkien: how the Folio Society attracted gen Z readers (The Guardian)
• How the Horse Girl Became Our Most Enduring (and Queerest) Archetype of Girlhood (Kristen Patterson, Reactor)
• You Can Quote Me on That: On Finding Inspiration in the Language of Children’s Books: Amy Gash Considers the Timeless Wisdom of Great Kid Lit (Literary Hub)
• The Necessity of Book Reviews, specifically in academic/scholarly publishing. (Jill O’Neill, The Scholarly Kitchen)
• ‘It will renew your faith in humanity’: books to bring comfort in dark times (Francesca Segal, The Guardian) I will admit that unlike the author of this essay, I I have not outgrown fairytales. Like Segal, I have a long list of books that reassure me that “despite everything, it is going to be OK,” but most of mine are genre fiction, and many are fantasy. Still, I enjoyed Segal’s list of literary fiction books that meet this criterion, and I already have several of them on my TBR list (Lessons in Chemistry and Tom Lake chief among them.)

For Writers and Bloggers

• Now More Than Ever, Keep Writing (Dan Desai Martin) On why your writing, your stories and books, are even more important now. (And if you’re a reader but not a writer, this piece is still worth reading.) You might also enjoy his follow-up, “I’m off to Mordor”, though it’s more about how to continue on through the challenges ahead.
• How to use Bluesky Social: Everything to know about the popular X alternative (ZDNet)

Book Tech

• OpenAudible is “a cross-platform audiobook manager designed for Audible users” that lets you “download, view, and manage all your Audible books” on your own computer. You can convert them to MP3 or M4B files and upload them to any of your listening devices. NOTE: I have not yet tried this software, so I am neither advertising it nor recommending it, but I thought you might like to know that it exists.

Free Fiction Online

• Nicole @ Bookwyrm Knits has put together a list of 10 free sci-fi and fantasy short stories you can read online.

Cool, Fun, and Awesome

• LEGO had a fun “Books Are My Passion” Set. I would have loved one of these, but you had to buy at least $120 in LEGO sets to get it, and now they’re all gone.
• Tree.fm is a website that lets you listen to recordings of natural sounds from random forests around the world: birds calling, insects chirping or buzzing, wind rustling the leaves, rain falling, a babbling brook, the sound of the wind. It’s really lovely and relaxing.
• Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed After Nearly 200 Years (New York Times; may be behind paywall) It’s short but lovely, and very Chopin… and completely unknown until now. (If you can’t view the video on the NYT website, you can hear the audio recording on YouTube, albeit without the video of Lang Lang playing it.)
• The new Paddington in Peru trailer:

Book Lists

• NPR’s “Books We Love” is back with 350+ of their favorite books of 2024 (NPR) This used to be called NPR’s “book concierge”; rather than a list, it lets you choose categories—not only genres, but things like “Rather Short,” “It’s All Geek To Me,” and “Funny Stuff.” Bonus: you can also look at previous years’ collections, going back to 2013.
• Five of the best science fiction books of 2024 (The Guardian)
• The Best Thrillers of The Past 10 Years (Book Riot)

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