Just as booksellers are inundated with AI slop and publishing is reckoning with suspicions of AI-written books, academic publishing is facing similar issues—and their approaches to the problem, including vetting tools and guidelines for authors, can inform and inspire trade publishers. Submissions to academic journals have ballooned, and, while it’s impossible to prove, many of the papers have the signs of AI, including mistakes and authors with a large number of publications in just a few years, medical journal editor Itamar Ashkenazi said in a recent presentation for the Committee On Publication Ethics (COPE). Generative AI can be useful in […]
People 8/21
Obituary: Eddie Bell
Former Harper Collins UK ceo Eddie Bell died at 77 years old, the Bookseller reports. He started in publishing in sales at Hodder in 1973. He came to the US to found Harper Paperbacks in the 1980s and became ceo of Harper UK in 1990. After retiring from Harper in 2000, he co-founded Bell Lomax Moreton Literary Agency. “We were sorry to hear of the death of Eddie Bell, who had a long and successful career in publishing and for a decade served as executive chairman and publisher of Harper Collins UK,” current Harper UK ceo Kate Elton said. “Eddie was a […]
Attorneys In Anthropic Settlement File Appeal Over Fee-Sharing
Just before the August 19 deadline for any appeals of the final settlement in the Anthropic copyright infringement case, Edelson and Oppenheim + Zebrak, the two firms brought in by publishers as “Publishers’ Coordination Counsel,” filed a notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit’s Court of Appeals. The firms say they “intend to focus their appeal on issues related to the Order Granting in Part Motion for Attorneys’ Fees, Reimbursement of Expenses,” but the notice is phrased as an appeal of “the Judgment entered on July 20, 2026, including all prior orders encompassed in that decision.” That leaves opaque for […]
People 8/20
Barkan Book Removed From Retail Sites After Plagiarism Backlash
Political columnist Ross Barkan’s THE REVOLUTIONARY: Zohran Mamdani and the Remaking of American Politics, which was scheduled to publish from Random House on October 6, has disappeared from most retailer sites. Last week, New York magazine announced that an internal review found improper “attribution of language, information and/or sourcing” in 67 of Barkan’s pieces and dropped him as a contributor, the magazine said in a statement. The book is no longer listed on the Penguin Random House website or Edelweiss, or major retailer sites including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, the Washington Post reports. The book remains on […]