(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Nonfiction Views: Teachers, authors under threat from book bans, criminals and AI, plus new releases [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-08 BOOK NEWS Censorship, book banning and AI copyright piracy continue to be big topics in the publishing world. In this depressing story from the Tallahassee Democrat, there is anecdotal evidence that schoolteachers in Florida are selling off their classroom library collections out of fear of the book banning laws passed by the state: It's not uncommon for Abby Bell to see teachers bearing books, wanting to offload them in between school years. She’s the store manager of one of Chamblin Bookmine’s two locations, which has offered Jacksonville enormous inventories of used books for decades…. Bell says she’s noticed something uncommon in this year’s influx of books from teachers. Joining the typical older, beat-up books are hundreds of newer titles, most of them children’s books depicting minority characters…. About 150 miles down the East Coast, MerryBeth Burgess has seen something similar in Cocoa, where she owns Hello Again Books with her wife, Amy Elkavich. “We’ve had classrooms as low as elementary schools, we’ve had high school classroom teachers, go ahead and bring us their donations because they’re unsure of exactly what is banned, what isn’t banned,” Burgess said. “They don’t want to have to be in fear for their job, but they are on a daily basis. It’s not just the political book banning crowd that is a threat to authors. Scottish author Jennifer McAdams, who wrote Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen, one of the books in this week’s new release list below, has had to cancel some of her UK book signing appearances because of “death threats and vile online abuse.” Presumably, the criminal networks she exposed are behind the threats. x Thank you @thebookseller for publishing the correct information regarding why my book #DevilsCoin launch events were cancelled. It's important to me that the correct information is published. https://t.co/cfSVr01Ahu pic.twitter.com/ruoPWOOxOS — Jennifer McAdam (@JenMcAdamUK) August 3, 2023 On the artificial intelligence front, authors continue to do battle with AI creators who are feeding their works into databases to ‘train’ the algorithms, and even creating books falsely attributed to an author. As an author who specializes in helping other writers get published, Friedman has amassed a solid following for a number of books, including "The Business of Being a Writer," "What Editors Do," and "Publishing 101." She recently noticed a number of new titles on similar topics: "Your Guide to Writing a Bestseller eBook on Amazon," "Publishing Power: Navigating Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing," and "Promote to Prosper: Strategies to Skyrocket Your eBook Sales on Amazon…." "As of today, there are about half a dozen books being sold on Amazon, with my name on them, that I did not write or publish," Friedman said. "Some huckster generated them using AI." Today, the author says that Amazon, as well as GoodReads, which also had the books under her name, have finally removed the books. On Monday morning, numerous writers woke up to learn that their books had been uploaded and scanned into a massive dataset without their consent. A project of cloud word processor Shaxpir, Prosecraft compiled over 27,000 books, comparing, ranking and analyzing them based on the “vividness” of their language. Many authors — including Young Adult powerhouse Maureen Johnson and “Little Fires Everywhere” author Celest Ng — spoke out against Prosecraft for training a model on their books without consent. Even books published less than a month ago had already been uploaded. Prosecraft.io, a site that used novels to help power a data-driven project to display word count, passive voice, and other much more subjective, writing-style markers such as vividness, shut down today after authors protested the project…. Zach Rosenberg was the author who first brought this site to the larger attention of authors on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Pretty soon, more and more authors spoke out, including high-profile authors like Jeff VanderMeer (The Southern Reach trilogy), Indra Das (The Devourers), Gretchen Felker-Martin (Manhunt)…. Fair Use does not, by any stretch of the imagination, allow you to use an author’s entire copyrighted work without permission as a part of a data training program that feeds into your own “AI algorithm.” While this situation is certainly going to be a lesson for many people, it’s clear that authors are not going to allow their work to be used to train LLMs and vector networks. The merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster was shot down, to the relief of all who did not want to see two of the biggest publishers consolidate. But now it has been announced that private equity company KKR is buying S&S. Author Cory Doctorow has some very good thoughts on this, and it’s worth a read: Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster If you want to peruse Barack Obama’s 2023 summer reading list, I have them conveniently gathered together at my Literate Lizard Online Bookstore. Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses": THIS WEEK’S NEW NONFICTION The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America, by Kathryn J. Edin, H. Luke Shaefer and Timothy J. Nelson. Three of the nation’s top scholars ­– known for tackling key mysteries about poverty in America – turn their attention from the country’s poorest people to its poorest places. Based on a fresh, data-driven approach, they discover that America’s most disadvantaged communities are not the big cities that get the most notice. Instead, nearly all are rural. Little if any attention has been paid to these places or to the people who make their lives there. This revelation set in motion a five-year journey across Appalachia, the Cotton and Tobacco Belts of the Deep South, and South Texas. The unfolding revelation in The Injustice of Place is not about what sets these places apart, but about what they have in common—a history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. This history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new War on Poverty, with the unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need. Devil's Coin: My Battle to Take Down the Notorious OneCoin Cryptoqueen, by Jennifer McAdam. Jen McAdam was a victim of the OneCoin global cryptocurrency fraud, which stole tens of billions of dollars from ordinary people around the world. Unlike Madoff or Enron, who relieved the world’s wealthiest investors of their cash, the exploiting genius of the OneCoin scam was targeting the poorest people in the world, the “unbanked”—those who struggled to live or get mainstream banking support. The fraudsters believed their victims couldn’t and wouldn’t fight back. They didn’t reckon on Jen McAdam, a modern-day Erin Brockovich. Despite terrifying attempts to shut down both her and her growing support groups, she fought tirelessly for justice for herself, her family and friends, and the millions around the world who lost everything, in some cases even their lives. This is a true David-and-Goliath story to give us all a message of hope about the power we as individuals can have, even when things seem hopeless. From One Cell: A Journey into Life's Origins and the Future of Medicine, by Ben Stanger. Each of us began life as a single cell. From this humble origin, we embarked on a risky journey fraught with opportunities for disaster. Yet, amazingly, we reached our destination intact, emerging as dazzlingly complex, exquisitely engineered assemblages of trillions of cells. This metamorphosis constitutes one of nature’s most spectacular yet commonplace magic tricks—and one of its most coveted secrets. In From One Cell , physician and researcher Ben Stanger offers a breathtaking glimpse into what scientists are discovering about how life and the body take shape, and how these revelations stand to revolutionize medicine and the future of human health. From One Cell Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: The Astonishing New Science of the Senses, by Maureen Seaberg. In 2016, scientists proved that humans could see light at the level of a single photon. Around the world, other recent discoveries about the senses are just as astounding. It turns out we can hear amplitudes smaller than an atom, smell a trillion scents, have a set of taste buds that can discern molecules of fresh water, and can feel through the sense of touch the difference of a single molecule. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made takes readers through their own bodies, delving into the molecular and even the quantum, and tells the story of our magnificent sensorium and what it means for the next wave of human potential. Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning, by Sarah Stankorb. Journalist Sarah Stankorb outlines how access to the internet—its networks, freedom of expression, and resources for deeply researching and reporting on powerful church figures—allowed women to begin dismantling the false authority of evangelical communities that had long demanded their submission. A generation of American Christian girls was taught submitting to men is God’s will. They were taught not to question the men in their families or their pastors. They were told to remain sexually pure and trained to feel shame if a man was tempted. Some of these girls were abused and assaulted. Some made to shrink down so small they became a shadow of themselves. To question their leaders was to question God. All the while, their male leaders built fiefdoms from megachurches and sprawling ministries. They influenced politics and policy. To protect their church’s influence, these men covered up and hid abuse. Among those who stayed (and a few who still loved the church they fled), a brave group of women spoke up. They built online megaphones, using the democratizing power of technology to create long-overdue change. All book links in this diary are to my newly updated online bookstore The Literate Lizard. If you already have a favorite indie bookstore, please keep supporting them. If you’re able to throw a little business my way, that would be appreciated. Use the coupon code DAILYKOS for 15% off your order, in gratitude for your support (an ever-changing smattering of new releases are already discounted 15% each week). We also partner Libro.fm for audiobooks. Libro.fm is similar to Amazon’s Audible, with a la carte audiobooks, or a $14.99 monthly membership which includes the audiobook of your choice and 20% off subsequent purchases during the month. READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/8/2185454/-Nonfiction-Views-Teachers-authors-under-threat-from-book-bans-criminals-and-AI-plus-new-releases Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/