News & Notes – 3/22/2025

March 22, 2025 Lark_Bookwyrm News & Notes 1

News & Notes is a weekly 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. The Atlantic, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have paywalls, but allow a small number of free articles per month or with a free trial.

Bookish News

Meta asked an arbitrator to block a former exec from promoting her tell-all memoir, which they did. The book’s publisher isn’t having any of it. (Flatiron Books, on Bluesky) The attempt to silence the author backfired, bringing even more attention to the book. (Smart Bitches, Trashy Books) The memoir is called Careless People; you can find reviews almost everywhere you look. There’s also this opinion piece in the New York Times. And The Guardian reports that Meta exposé tops bestseller chart despite company’s attempt to ban its promotion; that’s true in the US as well as the UK.
ALA statement on White House assault on the Institute of Museum and Library Services (American Library Association) The administration seems determined to eliminate everything good that our government does or offers, including library funding. See also Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now for steps you can take to oppose these cuts. (Kelly Jensen, Book Riot). Also check out Jensen’s related piece on the IMLS, below.
Literature Awards: Here are the winners of this year’s National Book Critics Circle Awards. And also, The Climate Fiction Prize has announced its first shortlist. (both articles from Literary Hub)

Worth Reading/Viewing

The Institute for Museum and Library Services Is Now a Propaganda Machine is a provocative title for an article, but it may well be true. The Institute’s new acting director said in a statement that the IMLS will “work in lockstep with the administration” to “preserve our country’s core values, promote American exceptionalism and cultivate love of country in future generations.” Book Riot’s Kelly Jensen explains what that could mean for libraries and museums. (And I’ll just add that the “core values” demonstrated by the administration’s actions so far don’t align with those of most Americans, according to polls.) There’s also lots of book ban news at the bottom of the article.
‘More are published than could ever succeed’: are there too many books? “While some say the rise of the self-publishing model is damaging the industry, others feel it gives authors a fairer deal.” (Richard Godwin, The Guardian) The article gives a number of reasons for the rise in self-publishing, and points out problems in the traditional-publishing model (including overproduction and outsourcing the risk to authors) that can make self-publishing more attractive and potentially more remunerative.
With Inclusive Design, ‘Everyone Can Be a Reader’: Union Square’s new “Everyone Can Be a Reader” series is dyslexia-friendly. (Publishers Weekly) Pair that article with Addressing the Literacy Crisis with Dyslexia-Friendly Tools (also Publishers Weekly), which dives into how specially-designed fonts and other tools can help people with dyslexia and—in the case of large print editions—just about everyone read more easily, and with more comprehension.
Diversity in Historical Romance or “Did BIPOC People Exist Before 1950?” (Reddit) There has been yet another case of an author trying to gatekeep historical romance on the grounds of “historical accuracy.” Essentially, Catherine Riegel claimed she could only include people of color in her HR in the roles of a Jamaican cook and enslaved people freed by the (white) protagonist. This Reddit discussion disagrees, fairly vehemently, rightly pointing out (yet again) that there were, in fact, BIPOC people in historic eras who thrived, experienced love, and found happy endings… and that their absence from “history” is due to who was writing and teaching the history.
The 2025 Trans Rights Readathon [Began] March 21st! (Book Riot) Trans rights and even trans existence are increasingly under attack from state and federal leaders (Texas is even considering a bill which would make it a felony to identify as trans). The Trans Rights Readathon “aims to uplift, amplify, and support trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and Two-Spirit authors.” This Book Riot article has suggestions on how to participate and and a link to suggested reading on Storygraph. (A note: I have trans and nonbinary relatives, friends, and former students whose rights, happiness, and even lives and livelihoods are now at risk, so please don’t try to justify these punitive laws and executive orders to me. People should have the freedom to be their authentic selves without having to fear imprisonment, job loss, housing loss, or violence.)

AI (“artificial intelligence”)

The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem (The Atlantic) The article includes a search engine that lets you search for authors and works included in the LibGen dataset of pirated books used by Meta developers to train OpenAI. (With, I might add, full knowledge that the books were pirated.) Every single author I looked up was in that database, with multiple pirated works, from well-known bestselling authors to little-known indie authors.
Book Biz to Big Tech: Pay Up, Then We Can Make Up. Ed Nawotka looks at the state of publisher and author pushback over the unauthorized use of pirated books and articles to train generative AI (LLMs.) (Publishers Weekly)
How good are you at distinguishing between human-written and AI-generated text? Take this quiz to find out! If you’re an Agatha Christie fan, you’ll have a slight advantage on this particular quiz… but you’ll probably still get several wrong.