Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. On Saturdays, we round up the biggest stories of the week.
The 100 bestselling books of the past 50 years
Interesting to browse this list of the 100 best-selling books of that last fifty years from The Timesso see just how different the UK market has (and hasn’t been) different than here in the States. I don’t want to spoil it because it is worth it for the surprise, but only would I never have guessed the #1 best-seller, but I wouldn’t have gotten any of the top ten.
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.
How Ireland became the world’s literary powerhouse
The world’s literary 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 everything? 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.
My personal internet this week was chock full of adaptation news, reviews, announcements, teases, reveals, and other digital publicity efforts. And you know what? I was into it. So as a way of covering some of the notable fall adaptations: my personal hype rating of six notable upcoming adaptations, scaled 1 to 10 (1 being this should not exist and 10 being I would drop everything and watch this now if I could).
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