Authors

Yet another group of authors has filed class action copyright infringement lawsuits against artificial intelligence pioneers Open AI and Meta, claiming the companies' AI services used unauthorized copies of their books to train their AI models, including copies that were allegedly scraped from notorious pirate sites.  Read more

In April, Richard North Patterson-author of 16 New York Times bestsellers-published an essay in the Wall Street Journal about his difficulties finding a publisher for his first novel in nine years.  Read more

The 1990s were a boom time for fiction. In those days - and this is not an exaggeration - a teenage girl could secure a half million pound advance for a one-page outline of her first novel. Those of us who had been in the business since of old viewed the transformed present with bemusement and bitter envy.  Read more

"I have only the vaguest understanding of what TikTok is," said Ann Patchett, owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville. So she still doesn't quite grasp how savvily Sarah Arnold, Parnassus's marketing manager, has leveraged the platform to promote the bookstore-or what a microcelebrity Patchett herself has become on the app.

In the 18th-century, a specter was haunting Europe-the specter of "Werther Fever." Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, was so popular that it catapulted the young Goethe into international fame and set off a trend of young men wearing yellow trousers and electric blue jackets... and also, allegedly, thousands of imitation suicides.