Hesperus Press

Et Remotissima Prope

[AhMad 𝕏 Ansari @Ahmadansari2233]

New way to read Comic Book (Digital Style)

[Indie Book Spotlight @BookSpotlight]

This is just so depressing to see. Readers deserve better than this.

[Encyclopaedia Britannica @Britannica]

Tragique.

[Douglas A. Boneparth @dougboneparth]

Remember to treat your body like a data center.

Consume as much literature and water as possible.

[🥷 @_iamhabeeb]

apparently the only place left without ads is a book

[lil c @seclilc]

AI;DR

(AI; didn’t read)

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Word of the day:

Villanelle

A 19-line poem, or, for a better explanation:
https://t.co/pKe3eLlSSZ

[Adam Parkhomenko @AdamParkhomenko]

Libraries bringing their A game to social media

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Virginia Woolf argued that writers need financial independence and a room of their own.

In 'A Room of One's Own' (1928), she put that figure at £500 a year.

In today's money (adjusted for inflation), that's about £40,000.

That's it. That's the post.

[Alison Fisk @AlisonFisk]

Sipping my coffee ☕️ and thinking about these marvellous Minoan cups!

They look so modern it’s incredible to think they were made by Bronze Age potters some 3,800 years ago!

Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. 📷 by me

#Archaeology

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

"The one most essential obstacle to the chance of success in all this was probably Lady Carbury's conviction that her end was to be obtained not by producing good books, but by inducing certain people to say that her books were good."

Anthony Trollope, "The Way We Live Now"

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

🫶 "book club near me" trending

[Michael Fritzell (Asian Century Stocks) @MikeFritzell]

The Google Trends newsletter is such a good way to get into the minds of the average global consumer

[devalopr @_devalopr]

It's completely unnecessary to destroy books when machines like this exist.

This book scanner by Treventus for example, can scan fragile books without destroying it.

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Glad to see this story getting the backlash it deserves

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Vean el gigantesco almacén de libros que la empresa de Inteligencia Artificial Anthropic obtuvo bajo el proyecto secreto Panamá, donde usó 2 millones de libros para entrenar a su IA y luego los destruyó para evitar denuncias de derecho intelectual.

El capitalismo destruye y mercantiliza todo; desde la naturaleza hasta el conocimiento, nada está a salvo bajo la ley de la selva capitalista.

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Hic 👇

[Teddy Rook Book @TeddyRookBook]

At what age does everyone else’s kids start learning Latin?

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Born #OTD

[Laure لور @LaureA791190]

Perhaps, it should not; rather, it should let go and yield the void @thefullvoid .. to be empty to be the place for god, who is perhaps its own energy all in one with all that has existed. #poetry

[Hesperus Press @HesperusPress]

Born #OTD

[Christopher F @ChristopherF198]

Following a standard workplace safety check, I have just received an email from a university administrator in which my custom of keeping books on the shelves in my office is described as "the unnecessary storing of combustible materials".