Ghostwriting and publishing services firm Scribe Media abruptly shut down yesterday, laying off its staff. Wednesday evening the company sent an email to employees’ personal email addresses, stating: “Based on unforeseen business circumstances and faltering business based on unavailability of additional capital, Scribe is forced to shut down its operations and layoff employees at our Austin location on May 24, 2023.” An employee said staff was initially notified in a Zoom meeting, with company email access and healthcare cut off by the end of the day, and the company offering no severance. The employee estimated layoffs numbered 85 to 100 […]
Archives for May 2023
ABA Continues to Add Members, With Slower Growth In Locations
The ABA reported through the AP that the booksellers’ organization added 173 members over the last year. The ABA now counts 2,185 bookstore members, operating 2,599 locations in all. Forty-six new stores added over the past year reported diverse ownership. That represents an increase of 175 members — yet they only grew by 52 locations. In calendar 2023, ABA ceo Allison Hill indicated book sales look to be “softer”, though the association added 56 member stores so far, and with 18 stores closing. Separately, the ABA itself released an interesting statistic about online sales volume conducted through their Indie Commerce […]
Those Fancy Large Language Models Were Trained On eBooks From Smashwords, Without Permission
With the avalanche of interest in generative AI and the large language models they are trained on, stories have resurfaced showing the process’s dirty roots. As shown in a 2021 working paper authored by Jack Bandy and Nicholas Vincent, OpenAI, Google’s BERT and variants, and many other foundational LLMs all have “documentation debt” to BookCorpus, “a popular text dataset for training large language models.” Compiled in 2014 by researchers at the University of Toronto and MIT, BookCorpus should have been called Stolen from Smashwords. The researchers apparently scraped posted, self-published ebooks posted by Smashwords that were being offered to read […]
June Read With Jenna Pick
Jenna Bush Hager chose The Celebrants, by Steven Rowley as the Today Show Read With Jenna Pick for June.
Distribution: Page & Vine
Page & Vine, the publisher founded by author author Meredith Wild, will sell and distribute their titles through Simon & Schuster in the US and Canada, beginning with summer 2023 titles.