Unhappy Customers

Indie publishers are sounding the alarm over changes in the newly revitalized Barnes & Noble’s buying practices, which some say have caused their sales at the retailer to nosedive. The AI industry notched its second legal victory this week over authors and publishers, with a judge siding with Meta in a lawsuit brought by such writers as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Andrew Sean Greer alleging that the company illegally used their books to train its AI models. More than 10,000 library professionals will converge on Philadelphia today as the ALA kicks off its five-day annual conference amid a particularly fraught moment for the nation’s libraries. Lori Benton has departed Scholastic to head up Abrams’ growing children’s division. The Atlantic unpacks “Silicon Valley’s assault” on publishing, and Ars Technica points out that AI firm Anthropic cut up and threw away millions of print books in the process of training its AI. The New York Times wonders what happened to the “novel-reading man”—and why men seem to have given up on fiction. Plus, the Paris Review considers the challenges of translating poetry, and the London Review of Books looks at a slate of recent books that try to crack open the enigma of Joan Didion.