The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas has agreed to expedite oral arguments in the appeal of the preliminary injunction blocking the state of Texas’s cumbersome “READER” book banning law. (The injunction was stayed pending appeal, meaning the law is in force until further action from the appeals court.) A full schedule has the case due to be fully briefed by November 3.
Third Quarter Deals Ebb Overall, Gain At the Highest Level
Consumer book sales have continued to fall versus last year and the big pandemic highs, but are still running at their third-best level in years. (Circana Bookscan has YTD units at 527 million, down about 4 percent from 549 million units a year ago.) Meanwhile, investment by publishers in future product both aligns with and diverges from the consumer sales trend. As a reminder, Q1 deals were weak — due in large part to the strike at Harper Collins and continued conservatism at Penguin Random House — and then rebounded in Q2, helped by later dates for the book fairs, […]
Yes, AI Was Trained on Your Book
Having already assured readers that a significant body of copyrighted books were used without permission to train large language models as part of the corpus researchers call Books3, the Atlantic is now ready to collect your rage clicks with a searchable database of those titles. “Since my article appeared, I’ve heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3. In almost all cases, the answer has been yes.” They tabulated 206 works by Nora Roberts; 133 from Danielle Steel; and only 121 by James Patterson. Amusingly, the publication also wants us to know that a long […]
Stay
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas formally issued a temporary administrative stay of Judge Alan D. Albright’s clear and unambiguous preliminary injunction blocking implementation of Texas’s cumbersome “READER” book banning law. The court is expected to decide further on whether or not to stay the original order pending the full appeal after the issue is fully briefed in early October.
Bookselling: New Stores
Solid State Books in Washington, DC has opened a second location, at 1809 14th St. NW. Barnes & Noble will open a store in Gainesville, GA in “early 2024.” Their last location in the area closed in 2013.
Project Gutenberg Refines Automated Audiobook Creation
Project Gutenberg has converted approximately 5,000 book files into audiobooks using synthetic voice. Working in concert with MIT and Microsoft, the project aimed to refine producing machine-generated audio conversions at scale. The researchers write: “Our system uses new advances in neural text-to-speech, emotion recognition, custom voice cloning, and distributed computing to create engaging and lifelike audiobooks…. We believe that this work has the potential to greatly improve the accessibility and availability of audiobooks.” In a paper on the project, they explain: “Different audiobooks require different reading styles. Nonfiction works benefit from a clear and neutral voice while fictional works with […]