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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.
The Clock Runs Out for TikTok’s Publishing Experiment
According to reporting from The Bookseller, TikTok parent company ByteDance appears to be closing 8th Note Press, the publishing imprint it launched in 2023. No one associated with the enterprise has gone on the record to confirm, but The Bookseller has discovered that “authors and agents are currently negotiating the return of rights to titles acquired by the publisher, and the business’ digital presence has apparently been quietly deleted.” Since its launch, 8th Note Press had acquired rights to more than 30 novels, guided by an editorial approach of “building backwards” informed by online trends. When TikTok’s move into publishing was first announced, its appeal seemed obvious: TikTok was moving units and minting bestsellers at a rate publishing had never seen before, and it had the power to decide what goes viral. What author wouldn’t want a connection on the inside?
As Jane Friedman reports, 8th Note Press seems to have failed not only to reverse-engineer BookTok success from the inside but to provide its authors any reasonable amount of support: “Authors who were on a successful self-publishing path have had their earnings and career trajectory seriously hampered.”
Gay Romance That Caused Authors to Flee Russia Now Available in English
Elena Malislova and Kateryna Sylvanova, who co-wrote Russian bestseller Pioneer Summer, a story of “forbidden first love” between two teenage boys who meet at summer camp in 1968, were forced to flee Russia in 2022 when right-wing media figures and politicians targeted them for allegedly violating a 2013 ban on “gay propaganda” for minors. The book, originally published online in 2017, was released in print in 2021—wrapped in plastic and labeled as 18+ in compliance with a law restricting distribution of queer literature—and sold more than 200,000 copies within six months. Due to a 2022 law that expanded the ban on “gay propaganda,” Pioneer Summer can no longer be sold in Russia, but an English edition published by Abrams is available now. Perfect timing for Pride Month. You know what to do.
What’s Happening to Reading in the Age of AI?
We’re still at the beginning of the conversation about the value of text and the utility of reading in the age of AI, and I am always here for a thoughtful and relatively non-alarmist conversation. Joshua Rothman asks a lot of good questions in this piece for The New Yorker, and I suspect he’s right that eventually, “The people who actually read “originals” will be rare, and they’ll have insights others lack, and enjoy experiences others forgo.” But he loses me with the assumption that “the era in which being “well-read” is a proxy for being educated or intelligent will largely be over,” making it “difficult to separate the deep readers from the superficial ones.” AI can read for you, but it cannot teach you to think. A new study out of MIT indicates that using AI tools like ChatGPT may result in decreased brain activity and erosion of critical thinking skills. In a possible future where many people rely on technology that is very good at reproducing and summarizing information and pretty bad at generating novel ideas, I believe we’ll know the deep readers from the superficial ones by the quality of their thoughts.
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