Anthropic is paying $1.5 billion over pirated books, but it can still legally cut up purchased ones

Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement covers pirated ebooks, while the court separately allowed it to scan and destroy lawfully purchased print books, a distinction now worrying Australian secondhand sellers about where their stock ends up.

Angela Nissel faces down grief with a laugh
Angela Nissel faces down grief with a laugh

Angela Nissel’s latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it’s a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it’s delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times. Of course, that sort of […]

Amazon’s short story collections are one of the best reasons to own a Kindle
Amazon’s short story collections are one of the best reasons to own a Kindle

Over the last few years, I’ve gradually shifted away from ebooks. It’s been part of a general return to physical media, an attempt to create a deeper sense of ownership over the art I love and collect. A Kindle is obviously more convenient than a paperback: It’s tiny, holds a huge library, and you can […]

Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning
Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon – nonfiction tomes that he […]

Synth historian Oli Freke will spend big on a good bicycle
Synth historian Oli Freke will spend big on a good bicycle

Oli Freke is a musician and journalist whose works have appeared in Sound on Sound, The Quietus, and Mixmag. This has included using math to explore the melodic potential of the Western 12-tone scale and deep dives on effects plug-ins. He’s even written a book tracing the evolution of the synthesizer from 1963 through 1995, […]

Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff  that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney’s, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he’d roll into the company’s offices and offer […]

The Guardian’s Carter Sherman fondly remembers being terrified by Ocarina of Time
The Guardian’s Carter Sherman fondly remembers being terrified by Ocarina of Time

Carter Sherman has been covering sex, gender, and the complex personal and national politics that accompany them for years. She was a senior reporter for Vice and has written for Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine as well. Along the way, she’s garnered a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and […]

Watch out, Amazon: the Kobo eReader now has a Goodreads rival

Kobo users can now automatically sync their reading progress to StoryGraph, making it easier to track books, reading stats, and challenges without relying on Amazon’s Goodreads.

Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’
Margaret Atwood says the problem with AI is ‘garbage in, garbage out’

Maraget Atwood, the storied author of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin, was interviewed as part of the Babell Literary and Cultural Festival in Porto, Portugal. As it usually does at these things, the issue of AI came up, and Atwood didn’t mince words. According to Deadline’s recap, Atwood said she’d used an AI […]

Japanese Gothic is a gorgeously grotesque ghost story
Japanese Gothic is a gorgeously grotesque ghost story

I’ll give the usual caveat: The horror novel Japanese Gothic is best experienced going in with as little information as possible. Content warnings for graphic gore, scenes of domestic violence, self-harm, and mental illness. If you’re okay with that, then consider pausing here. While I will try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, there will be […]