Gen AI subs are a big waste of time at BCS too. A steady 10% of subs to BCS are wholly or partially gen AI. My sorting of incoming subs takes twice as long. (Writers: if AI submittors stealing my time that could go to your subs is important to you, you need to take a stand on gen AI use in fiction.)

Excited!

What made “mass-market” paperbacks _mass-market_ wasn’t a trim size, a set of printing techniques, or a low price point. What made them mass-market was a distribution model that got them into literally tens of thousands of non-bookstore retail outlets. A distribution model that no longer exists. 1/2

Can confirm this doesn't happen, and that John's protagonist from his new novel is named Nike Coca-Cola just by coincidence.

The Google Books Settlement set the stage for this kind of large scale cultural theft, and privatization of the commons.

One person gets any money from a fanfic, or pirates a Metallica song and it's a tragedy for copyright, but you build an LLM that can vacuum up the entire Harlequin catalog and spit out thousands of romance novels in every conceivable combination of search terms and suddenly copyright is broken.

They want copyright to work for media cartels but not individual creators, authors and artists.

laughs in Texan

Cool how they admit their business model isn't feasible without theft.

Super glad we are burning through fossil fuels and drinkable water so that the world's most boring people can replace art with an autocorrect that will give hilariously literal translations of the world's worst books.

The Publishing Industry Has a Gambling Problem | The Walrus Companies keep betting on the next bestseller. Literature is poorer for it

I spent the summer reporting this essay on why it seems harder than ever to sell a book right now—especially if it isn't a debut and comes with the dreaded "sales track." I'm grateful to the writers, agents, editors, publishers & experts who spoke to me for this piece: thewalrus.ca/the-publishi...

Texas also has the second-largest LGBTQ population in the country — more than New York, only second to California. The second most immigrants, fourth most people of color. 4.8 million people voted for Kamala Harris or Jill Stein. That’s more people than even live in Oregon.

“Women of childbearing age should just leave Texas.”

Okay, aside from the economics of that... I’m an eighth generation Texan whose ancestors were among the first-ever to plant oats in places towns later formed. I deserve the right to stay here and fight for my home by telling the truth about it.

guess BoobTube was taken

so it's all on the end user here, too? I can prompt Claude to commit copyright infringement by asking it to write a novel in the style of an author, but Claude itself, the large language model comprised of the whole looted pantheon, is fair use?

text sections 12-21 of Northern District Court decision

this reasoning is astounding

To summarize, so long as they pay for the copies they want to digitize and feed the AI, the AI can slurp up all of your books to train itself. Hopefully Disney's lawyers are able to do better against Midjourney.

Strange Horizons 2026 A free weekly speculative fiction magazine with a global perspective.

If you love speculative fiction, then you owe a huge debt to @strangehorizons.bsky.social -- a magazine that successfully brought SFF short fiction online and expanded our ideas of what genre can do. It launched my career and many others. And it's still amazing.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/str...

FREE Ebooks: Abolish the Border, Abolish the Police In solidarity with all those standing up for our communities against the brutality of immigrant detention and police repression, we're offering free ebooks of three crucial books about border and poli...

Another world is possible if we fight for it.

UNBOUND AUTHORS: We’ve prepared a letter you can send to administrators to demand things like expedited rights reversion, no AI use, return of electronic files (cover art, typesetting, etc) and the option to get any remaining copies of your books. DM me and I will send the template over

I'll see about fixing that. Here's my MSWL. www.manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/ev...
You can follow submission guidelines on the website and just address it to me. We have a shared submission box at the agency.

There is a right way and a wrong way but no third way I know of on the subject of human rights. Enjoy the ratio bootlicker.

Oh look they built an AI that can disappoint its parents.

a black and white photo of a person wearing a pair of black combat boots . Alt: a black and white photo of a pair of black combat boots

How it taste?

The Third Way sounds like something you do when you can't pee or poop.

New York Mag Union

So 97% of @NYMagUnion members--including me!-- just signed a pledge to walk out of work if we don’t get a fair contract from @VoxMedia. If you love @NYMag, sign our solidarity pledge to support us in the event of a walkout:
nymagunion.org/reader-pledge

Based.

When norms are shattered, we shouldn't be looking to the normalizers to make new norms, we should be coming to the direct democracy table to renegotiate.

I consider all norms to be detentes on crucial issues where labor was fought to a standstill, and where a compromise was established to divide the electorate rather than meaningfully address capitalist excess and the penury of working Americans.