Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Anthropic Sued by Authors for Training Its AI on Their Books
Anthropic is now the third major tech player (after OpenAI and Meta) to be sued by authors for using copyrighted works to train their large language models. In this claim, the Books3 data set, which includes thousands of copyrighted books, is the central target. It was used to train Anthropic’s Claude LLM: this isn’t in dispute, as Anthropic has already admitted it. The question though is this legal? Does it rise to level of piracy? Or does machine-learning have the legal protection of human-learning, in which I can read as many books as I want to learn how to write better. This is probably the most important and interesting question out there in the world of books and reading.
831 Stories Aims to…Well Publish Romance Novels
Maybe I am missing something, but a romance imprint distributed by Simon & Schuster doesn’t really qualify as start-up, does it? There doesn’t seem to be anything novel in the conception, technology, or business model here, and even the vision statement feels more 2014 than 2024: “strip the label of guilty pleasure from the joyful experience of reading romance, and make it just…pleasure?” Romancelandia itself has been the most productive incubator or new ideas, stories, perspectives for the last decade (or more), so while I am all for new imprints, this one has the smell of leading from behind.
How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse
The world’s lieraray powerhouse might be a little much, but Ireland does seem to outpunch its weight when it comes to big-time awards and influence (four Nobels and six Bookers), so why exactly might that be? This article argues that it is sort of everthing? From libraries to funding to bookstore to lit mags to readership: Ireland seems to care more, on a per capita basis, about reading and writing than most countries. It would be fascinating to see some sort of breakdown/quantification of this “care,” some formula of public funding and educational dollars and book sales and so on, both for Ireland, and the wider reading and writing world.
The Best New Book Releases Out This Week
We are licking the last of summer out of the jar, but there are still interesting new books coming out before the Fall deluge (The Shafak is my next buy I think).
