Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
Waterstones Names Its Books of the Year
I think this is the shortlist, and eventually the book of the year will be named, give the huge banner on the page, but at the very least this is a list of their books of the year. Browsing UK best-of lists always feels a bit like a dream: somethings are recognizable (Katabasis, Sunrise at the Reaping) and some things feel like make-believe (Donut Squad Take Over the World, Strange Pictures). Weirdly, I was just talking about how much I liked Craftland, but had no idea who I would recommend it to. I forgot about the whole of the British Isles apparently.
Did Europa Editions Just Spoil Monday’s Booker Prize Announcement?
The Booker Prize, the most prestigious award for an English-language book in the world, will be announced Monday. I do not think publishers know ahead of time if their books is going to win. If they did, though, they might try to get special editions with a sticker or logo on the book ready to hit the shelves. And if they did that, might they not look something like this? Someone on IG (thank you!) sent this to us, and that really looks….suspicious.
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Amazon Introduces Kindle Translate
I have been waiting for the news of something like this to drop. AI is pretty good at translation. Not as good as expert humans, but unlike expert humans it is blazingly fast and really, really cheap. And in the case of Amazon’s new Kindle Translate, it looks like it might be free–at least for authors using Kindle Direct. The beta program will have English to Spanish and German to English available (who knows why). The plus side is that there are thousands and thousands of books that won’t ever be translated without something like this because the cost of having human translators is too high. The downside is that programs like this will put the paid labor of professional translators at risk, as the LLMs get better and reader and writer comfort with them rises.
Grammy Nominees for Audiobook of the Year
Also known as, what famous people have audiobooks out or audiobooks about music awards of the year. Snooze.