From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star
Book Review: Wickhills by Premee Mohamed
Manticores, vampyrs, and spies challenge a magical city
Christine D Baker has our review at the blog
http://www.nerds-feather.com/2026/08/book-review-wickhills-by-premee-mohamed.html
August reading recommendations: books about France in English
email registration required by 404 media
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
RE: https://flipboard.com/@ign/comic-book-news-7vhp5bdcz/-/a-luzUO6hoRSiE6rYfyFd3kw%3Aa%3A4274664-%2F0
I find the fandom’s pressure on George R.R. Martin to finish his saga quite problematic—and controversial. People forget that authors are human beings dealing with personal challenges. Ever since Lester del Rey, the Fantasy publishing industry has treated art purely as a commodity. We need to bring more empathy and humanity back into how we treat writers.
Free Book Alert!
So my book is on promotion on Kobo, discounted to $0 from 3rd to 9th August, but I think it's only available in these locations: CA, US, UK, AU, NZ. It's being featured on the Free Page of Diverse Stories, so hoping it gets some more attention. Help spread the word!
Here is a link to get it.
https://www.kobo.com/ebook/the-blossoming-of-the-big-tree-1
Time for a mental health break. Enjoy some fantasy fiction.
Witch's Familiar & Whimsical Stories includes a sardonic talking cat and a cross-dressing witch:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CVQTPYSS/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tfQoz8HnKf2VombwqWN6ceNs9aoSJw0fCg6SP_N95VaUXN9mBlHPTh43SnuWTlJZ8GUmJmEgUtqkTU54yC0ofnkSLHBRIr3cSPU4yYu8mY_03qVChv-WFP3p2X5DIs528wt14gm8wp2njj9s8TQuljFTydNwLkI5v1lThRBvCc15NqXMD1hBUT-MEkyVjK-dHbGFc8c1EgXbYbxWM00ahQ.NAHE-CcYMjQsp3w8LXhwxz0aJlYUf40fxJbxXqYq7cc&qid=1725151995&sr=8-1
#Witches #cats #fantasyfiction #whimsy #LGBTQIA #acecharacters #asexual #asexualcharacters #feministfiction #fantasy #cozyfantasy #Halloween #Samhain #whimsical #whimsicalfiction #Wicca #WritingCommunity #fiction #writing #indiebooks #bookish #books #booksbooksbooks #witchbooks
« Ce qui empêche néanmoins de prononcer ou d'écrire ce mot sans l’entourer de guillemets relève d’un ordre discursif complexe et historiquement sédimenté qui exclut de considérer les #Palestiniens comme les victimes potentielles d’un #génocide [...]
Déconstruire cet ordre discursif est l'objet des recherches actuelles de #NadiaAbuElHaj et de son prochain livre, intitulé #TheImpossibleGenocide. »
https://www.diagrammes.fr/fr/folders/le-genocide-impensable
#Gaza #Palestine #génocideÀGaza #livres #books @bookstodon
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Our July POTM looks at the life of Nobel Prize-winning crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who lived most of her adult life with rheumatoid arthritis.
by Elizabeth Wood
Quoted by Dorothy Hodgkin during her 1964 Nobel Prize Lecture, W. H. Bragg's "Concerning the Nature of Things" (Bragg's work influenced a young Dorothy Crowfoot to pursue science) is available on PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79146
cross-posted from: beehaw.org/post/27795833
In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works.
The team told participants whether their story was written by a human or AI, but this information was not always correct. The researchers then asked participants to rate how absorbing and engaging they found the story, and its quality.
Participants who read an AI-generated story rated it as more absorbing and of higher quality than those who read a story written by a human. However, participants gave higher ratings to stories they had been told were written by people.
Dr Deena Skolnick Weisberg, a senior author of the research from Villanova University in Pennsylvania, said: “AI systems can already generate short stories that are seen as being at least as good as – if not better than – human-written stories. We should update our views of AI’s abilities accordingly.”
However, Weisberg, who is herself a creative writer, said that did not mean writing should be left to AI, noting that novels produced by tech were probably going to be different from those written by humans.
“We may need to make room for AI-generated novels, and for AI/human co-written novels, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no longer space for us to appreciate the process of human creativity,” she said.
AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds
Love getting lost in a historical fiction series?
Set in 19th-century Ireland, The Fitzgeralds of Dublin series follows one family through hardship, secrets, and choices that echo across generations.
📚️️️ Books 1–9 available as box sets
📖 Read free in Kindle Unlimited
Amazon - https://mybook.to/FitzgeraldsBoxSets
#BooksByLornaPeel #Books #FamilySaga #HistoricalFiction #Bookstodon #Ireland #KindleUnlimited #Dublin @bookstodon
Since today is he 80th anniversary of the sentencing of the Nuremberg defendants, I am rereading "The Nuremberg Trial" by Ann and John Tusa.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/789376
I first read this book in 2022, and rated it 5 stars.
Now, I'm finding it very much worth the time to reread.
Ebook and paperback: https://books2read.com/TrollSong
Series Ebook omnibus: https://books2read.com/TheWizardsScion
Having an abusive assassin for a sister was bad enough, but when Lyra’s older sister, Nicole, becomes obsessed with killing the teenage troll, her life becomes a special kind of nightmare. Will she escape, or become just another victim of the unstoppable woman?
@bookstodon
#author #indieauthor #writing #fantasy #scifi #sciencefiction #sff #sciencefantasy #scifi #actionadventure #fiction #books
📚 The World Jones Made by: Philip K. Dick
Floyd Jones has always been able to see exactly one year into his future, a gift and curse that began one year before he was even born. As a fortune-teller at a post-apocalyptic carnival, Jones is a powerful force, and may just be able to force society away from its paralyzing Relativism...
https://bookblabla.com/book/the-world-jones-made
#books #reading #libraries #fiction #sciencefiction #generalfiction #literary
@bookstodon
Bonfire http://bonfirenetworks.org/ sounds like it could be great for the book community, though the name itself makes me a little nervous in this context. 🔥
RE: https://social.swordandfiddle.co.uk/notes/ar64iqiva218lj4g
Really great to get @amysparkes book into Kobo's Diverse Stories promotion this week.
Anyone want a free DRM-free historical fiction e-pub?
https://www.kobo.com/list/free-ebooks-diverse/0K8JUHSYBsAW2gjYatg68Q
#kobo #books #ebook #drmfree #noai #lgbtq #neurodiverse #bookstodon @bookstodon
Neutral and specific, which is really the best form a book like this can come in.
Pavlos Roufos – A Happy Future Is a Thing of the Past: The Greek Crisis and Other Disasters
https://lemmy.ml/post/51023079
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74144681
The symbol for Amazon’s VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.
Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.
The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.
In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”
📖Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.
These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/74144681
The symbol for Amazon’s VGT3, the Las Vegas facility where it scans book for AI training data.
Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.
The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.
In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”
📖Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.
These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
I have just started getting into reading magazines and specifically using Libby to read bits of articles here and there. I like the current political stuff and some media coverage but on the whole it hasn’t been a very interesting experience until I came across this short story
I didn’t even realize The New Yorker published short stories, at first I thought it was just an excerpt. It’s about an Indian girl who has to go live with her aunt for a little while while her mom and dad work through the grief of having gone through a miscarriage.
The mystery and intrigue builds up in little blocks, each paragraph showing us a little moment in Nidhi’s (our protagonist) life: her life with her parents, the going away to live with her aunt, meeting her aunt’s mentally handicapped daughter…
I thought it was really well-written and compelling and by the end of it it built such a well-realized cast of characters that each had shades of darkness and human qualities in them that I wanted to explore their stories more, to spend a little more time with their thoughts and personal griefs.
It’s a simple coming-of-age story that read like a thriller that was brilliantly paced and I would love it if other people learned about it as there wasn’t a lot of discourse online
Hidden Life by Madhuri Vijay - The New Yorker, August 24 issue
https://lemmy.ml/post/51532459
I've really outdone myself today. I've added a total of nine books to my digital library and to my TBR list. Of course that list really does number in the thousands, so I always add more books than I have time to read. I do read several books a week, just because I love to read. It is my passion in this life. You can have a look at my TBR list here, if you like.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/42679947?shelf=to-read&sort=date_added&order=d
"Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman's Power" by Louisa May Alcott , A.M. Barnard (Pseudonym). My rating: 3 out of 5 stars.
Book description: Originally published in 1866 under the pseudonym "A. M. Barnard." Louisa May Alcott's novel of romance and sexual intrigue is one of her lesser-known gems. Its tone and characterizations strike a markedly different chord from her best-known works, such as "Little Women" and "Little Men," and it remains a popular addition to her work.
Oh, I forgot about today’s weekly thread. So without further ado,
What have you all been reading or listening to lately?
Check Official Bingo Challenge Post and the accompanying Recommendations Post for our Bingo for 2026!
What book(s) are you currently reading or listening to? August 18
"A'mhionaid shiorraidh
A dh'itealaicheas an dealan-de
Os cionn na h-iochslaint"
"The eternal moment
The butterfly hovers
Over the nectar"
Grian is Frasan / Sunshine & Flowers: poems in Gaelic & English, by Angus Peter Campbell, published by Luath Press.
.
#books #livres #poetry #poesie #Gaelic #ScotsGaelic #AngusPeterCampbell #ScottishLiterature #ScottishPoetry #BilingualText #ParallelText #Bilingual #bookshops ##librairies #bookstodon #GrianIsFrasan #SunshineAndFlowers
