RIP the most influential man you’ve never heard of
A man named Larry Tesler passed away last week at the age of 74 in Portola Valley, California. You may not know who Larry Tesler was by name, but there’s… Read more »
Turns out AI writes bad poetry
Over at LitHub, Dennis Tang penned an essay examining the poetry of GPT-2, an artificial language program created by a San Francisco-based research firm called OpenAI. In the grand tradition… Read more »
Gomer ceases publishing new books; focuses on printing
Sad news from the valleys last week, as one of the biggest publishers in Wales, Gwasg Gomer, announces it is ‘winding down’ its publishing operations to focus solely on printing. In a story… Read more »
Vanity Fair has an amazing digital archive
Vanity Fair, founded in 1913, created an AMAZING online digital archive with all issues, all pages, and all the fun from the beginning of their time as a magazine until… Read more »
Why are we obsessed with reading books more quickly?
Let’s begin Friday with three questions that look a lot easier to answer than they actually are: How many books do you read in a year? Would you like to… Read more »
Robot authors trying to compete with Orwell
A non-profit lab called Open AI has announced that they’ve trained a machine to read, write, translate, and summarize text unsupervised. According to Open AI’s blog post, the objective is… Read more »
Is World Book Day becoming too expensive for parents?
When I was eight, I wore a box to school. Just for one day, mind—it was the inaugural World Book Day, in 1995, and I was dressed as Mr. Strong,… Read more »
Order, order! Publishers set to clean up in the wake of tidying craze
Ah, January. The holidays are over, and the only thing that remains are those weird chocolate liqueurs no-one wants to eat, and a nagging sense of regret: should I really have eaten… Read more »
But soft (focus)! What light through yonder hashtag breaks?
Surprising absolutely no people, The Bard is unequivocally the most-Instagrammed author in the history of the App Which Shows You What You’d Look Like As A Cat. So sayeth Maddy Foley over at Bustle, reporting on a study by… Read more »
Ambient literature is changing up the reading experience
The digital age has brought with it a bunch of new ways to read a book, but ambient literature might be the first step toward an entirely new way to… Read more »