@Techmeme@techhub.socialInvestigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to its Las Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialInvestigation: Amazon is buying huge quantities of rare books, scanning them for AI, and destroying them; a tracked Biblio order went to Amazon's Vegas facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipme…
@jdrm@social.linux.pizzaEsto es horroroso. Amazon, entre otras, comprando toneladas de libros antiguos para destruirlos en el proceso de aprendizaje de sus IAs. Los destruyen literalmente porque para escanearlos los guillotinan separando las hojas de la encuadernación. https://www.404media.co/we-…
@newsie@darktundra.xyzWe Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.depolbooks: Political books network (2004)
A network of books about U.S. politics published close to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and sold by Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of those books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished.
This network has 105 nodes and 441 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted, Metadata
@raiders@darktundra.xyzWatch: Raiders QB Kirk Cousins jokes after passing John Elway in record books https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2026/09/15/raiders-qb-kirk-cousins-jokes-john-elway-…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialAn NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialAn NYT reporter finds AI-generated, unauthorized biographies of herself and other journalists on Amazon, where AI-made books with elusive "authors" proliferate (Kashmir Hill/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/…
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialHow to read more #books
(quit social media 😉)
https://scotto.me/blog/2026-07-12-how-to-read-more-books/
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialFor me this age of AI is the time we should appreciate less polished handwritten texts for their authenticity. I see this happening during selection of job applications.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026…
@bourgwick@heads.socialthe debut novel by richard b. simon is a heady & fun eco-delic aqua-teen coming-of-age sci-fi/fantasy epic. the whales are pissed!
#books
@cdarwin@c.imThe idea of a suspension of the constitution had been introduced,
by the Constitution of 22 Frimaire Year 8.
Article 14 of the Charte of 1814 granted the sovereign the power to
"make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the security of the State"
Because of the vagueness of the formula, Chateaubriand observed
"that it is possible that one fine morning the whole Charte will be forfeited for the benefit of Art…
@mela@zusammenkunft.netOooooh, es gibt gerade ein Humble-Bundle mit C.J. Cherryh: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/best-cj-cherryh-daw-books-books
Cherryh gehört zu den Autorinnen, die der Science-Fiction seit den späten 1970ern neue Tiefe und Perspektiven verliehen haben – neben Ur…
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialNot EVERY work of culture (books, arts, music, theater, film) has to be remade to represent EVERY marginalized community.
It seems to me 't'would be much better to more heavily promote new works by marginalized creatives and / or covering marginalized communities as subject matter.
For example, I'm seeing a lot more new LBGTQ and BIPOC science fiction and fantasy than I used to. Some, awful, but a lot of it excellent.
@digitalnaiv@mastodon.social„Move fast and break democracy" – Gil Duršn erzählt in „The Nerd Reich", wie aus Sonntagsreden über Freiheit und Innovation ein handfester Plan für digitalen Feudalismus wurde. Thiel, Andreessen, Musk als selbsternannte Erlöser, die zufällig auch gleich die Weltherrschaft mitliefern. Unterhaltsam erzählt, aber zum Fürchten ernst gemeint – lesen!
@Xavier@infosec.exchangeAmazing reporting by #404Media today: https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
If you don't follow @… they first published an article about book companies buying books to be scanned and destroyed by AI companies. ( https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-books-because-theyre-free-of-ai-slop/ ) The main company that article was about deleted that offering and said "sikes!". They claimed it was just an exploratory business offering and they didn't do any of that. ( https://www.404media.co/ai-company-training-scanning-books-database-isbndb/ )
404 Media was like, hand me an air tag and hold my beer.
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.depolbooks: Political books network (2004)
A network of books about U.S. politics published close to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and sold by Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of those books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished.
This network has 105 nodes and 441 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted, Metadata
@kazys@mastodon.socialHave some of those filthy old yellow book scans to clean up, you know from the public domain books you got from archive.org? Have a modern Mac? Claude helped me rewrite Scantailor so that it processes PDFs instead of images and does so very, very fast. And it's integrated into Zotero.
1/2
@bencurthoys@mastodon.social@… A human who bought a copy of a book, read it, and dropped it in the bath would be doing the same thing, no? Books are not especially durable objects. They have a finite life.
@stefan@gardenstate.sociallol at page 350 the plot starts? omg
#books
@tezoatlipoca@mas.to
@gilest@mastodon.me.ukI made a little book out of some old bits of internet I found down the back of the sofa:
Talking dogs.
Sarcastic cats.
Strange sports.
Bizarre rituals.
Dumb jokes.
Stupid advice.
Weird ideas.
...OLD HAT
More info: https://gilest.org/books/old-hat/
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzNFL Week 1 Betting Report: Books, Bettors Still Navigating 49ers-Rams Tilt https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/2026-nfl-week-1-betting-report-books-bettors-still-navigating-49ers-rams-tilt
@darkrat@chaosfurs.social
@mia@hcommons.socialGreat suggestions for adult reading lists too! ‘Bold, brilliant, thrilling’: leading authors on the novels every school should teach | Books | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive…
@callunavulgaris@mastodon.scotThis is one of three #books I acquired yesterday. The other two are still in the car, I'm in my nightie and it's raining, so they're staying put for now 😄
The Constant Gardener by le Carré, The Golden Hours by Louisa Young and Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett.
I'm particularly looking fwd to TGH, the next in The Cazalet Chronicles, written by EJH's niece. It…
@colgrave@social.linux.pizzaRE: https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/116928387853350891
Can we like smash all the computers already?
Just like in the dune books..
Im tired
@Techmeme@techhub.socialHachette, Elsevier, Cengage Learning, and author Scott Turow sue Google for allegedly using millions of copyrighted books and articles to build AI models (A.J. Katz/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/tech/hachette-scott-turow-g…
@memeorandum@universeodon.comWe Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260817/p42#a260817p42
@bobmueller@mastodon.worldInteresting discussion over at /r/books. I haven't followed that many book series after an author's death or retirement. The first ones that spring to mind for me are Clancy, Parker, and Cussler.
https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1v
@bencurthoys@mastodon.social@… I find the revulsion to this interesting. They're only scanning/destroying one copy of each book. It's not like they're finding the whole print run and erasing it so they have the only version.
There are loads of second hand books in second hand bookshops that are never going to be read again and end up being recycled. There are load…
@aardrian@toot.cafeWhile in Jamestown, NY, I hit the library (as one does on vacation). It was having a book sale. There was a rack of Amish romance (Jamestown is adjacent to lots of Amish country).
I was quite tempted to buy some. Especially this Amish retelling of “Sense and Sensibility.”
I just need to know!
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialHappy #bookloversday
I grew up with books, and more books. My parents bought me books. I even exchanged some books with friends for a while.
When I started commuting, reading became my daily companion in the train. Books have always been a part of my life.
Thanks to all the authors and writers
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialHachette, Elsevier, Cengage Learning, and author Scott Turow sue Google for allegedly using millions of copyrighted books and articles to build AI models (A.J. Katz/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/tech/hachette-scott-turow-g…
@bourgwick@heads.socialfinally devoured this absolute unit & it feels kind of cruel to tom o'neill & everybody involved that i'm totally ready for volume 2. suppose i could rewatch the errol morris doc. not totally sold on anything (& maybe neither is o'neill), but that's not the point, either. #books
@cdarwin@c.imAfter reading Jill Lepore’s
"The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State", I have a new destination for a time machine, should I ever finally get my hands on one.
I’d set the dial to some night in the late 1970s or ’80s and visit the boyhood rooms of the Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Sam Altman.
Then I’d confiscate all of their science fiction. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein—all of it.
As young people, the future billionaire…
@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.social"A surfeit of sources: An annotated bibliography of data management books for librarians"
https://doi.org/10.29173/iq1181
"Over the past decade, more than thirty books have been published which seek to provide data management foundational and continuing education materials for an acade…
@jake4480@c.imNow the shitty 'AI' companies are buying actual books, ingesting them, and destroying them. Great.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
@losttourist@social.chatty.monsterHow long have books (actual paper books) been adding this to their copyright page, I wonder?
#AI #copyright #bookstodon
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"There’s the image of the Green Zone, this Emerald City run by the US in the middle of Baghdad, built by Halliburton and all of these private contractors... these contractors migrated [from Iraq] to Hurricane Katrina, and the idea that these climate disasters are their next growth frontier. Reporters started calling New Orleans ‘Baghdad on the Bayou’. The gang’s all here, there’s Halliburton, there’s Bechtel, there’s Blackwater" -- Naomi Klein
@tux0r@layer8.spaceZur Situation der Menschheit: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social
@philip@mastodon.mallegolhansen.com@… Right. The “Signature Series” are collections of books curated(allegedly?) by the undersigned.
Both Fowler and Beck have these series of books with their signatures on them. Some written by them, others not, all the ones I’ve read so far very useful and good books.
So I didn’t want to miss out on completing the collections :)
@bibbleco@infosec.exchangeOh, that's a real loss. RIP Bonnie Greer.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/16/bonnie-greer-writer-and-cultural-commentator-dies-aged-77
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.depolbooks: Political books network (2004)
A network of books about U.S. politics published close to the 2004 U.S. presidential election, and sold by Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of those books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished.
This network has 105 nodes and 441 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Unweighted, Metadata
@kurtsh@mastodon.social
@lpryszcz@genomic.socialAn impressive resources trying to uncover what and why #bigtech is using to train LLMs
AI Watchdog: The Atlantic’s ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world’s most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.
@cowboys@darktundra.xyzNFL Week 1 Betting Report: Books Expecting Big Action On Cowboys, Bengals https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-week-1-betting-report-books-expecting-big-action-cowboys-bengals
@vague@social.linux.pizza#Shopped some #leatherbound #books by Brandon #Sanderson from
@dr2chase@ohai.socialCar drives over book because it's too hard to stop and pick it up (or maybe the driver hates books, can't exclude that possibility), guy on bike picks it up because it's not hard. Big choices shape little choices.
https://vimeo.com/1226279482?fl=pl&fe=sh
@rasterweb@mastodon.social @Mediagazer@mstdn.socialMemoir excerpt: Ari Emanuel details Endeavor's bare-knuckle acquisition strategy to take over William Morris Agency, in a coup that changed Hollywood forever (Ari Emanuel/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/ari
@LaChasseuse@mastodon.scotInteresting to compare the author Neal Stephenson's profiles on X/twitter vs. Bluesky.
He has 89,4 K followers on X, where he still posts, but just under 10 K on Bluesky, where he doesn't post at all.
He has many fans on the fediverse who discuss his books, but he is not here.
@cellfourteen@social.petertoushkov.euSchool book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books - Index on Censorship
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalat…
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizzaI don't know if the judge will do it, but...
Turf every trustee and appoint a new trustee to oversee the 'bankruptcy'. Trustee engages engineers, electricians and plumbers for a full review of the facility. Full forensic audit of the books.
https://www.ctvnews.ca…
@awinkler@openbiblio.social
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#WordWeavers Sept 13: Share a line of dialogue that sounds innocent without context but absolutely isn’t.
Plenty of conversations in my books are not what they seem, but I will let the readers themselves decide where they want to be, what interpretation they would like to believe.
This is from my upcoming book “Management Apologises for the Inconvenience”.
@grumpybozo@toad.socialRE: https://social.coop/@afewbugs/116907180771031797
Which compels me to mention a good book: Why Fish Don’t Exist.
@aral@mastodon.ar.alIs that literally their logo? A dinosaur devouring a book? These fuckers have no shame. @… https://www.404media.co/inside-the-warehou
@cdarwin@c.imThere are some words out there that are brilliantly evocative.
Yiddish has the word shlimazl, which basically means a perpetually unlucky person.
German has the word Backpfeifengesicht, which roughly means a face that is badly in need of a fist.
And then there’s the Japanese word tsundoku, which perfectly describes the state of my apartment.
It means buying books and letting them pile up unread.
The word dates back to the very beginning of modern Japan, the M…
@bourgwick@heads.social
@dnddeutsch@pnpde.social"Your frog body is no more, but you’re still a frog at heart and want nothing more than to escape the tower and get back to your favorite swamp. You peek out into the hall and see a crowd of wizards passing by.…What will you do?"
https://www.
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.dedouban: Douban friendship network (2009)
A friendship network among users on Douban.com, a Chinese website providing recommendations for books, music, and movies.
This network has 154908 nodes and 327162 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/douban…
@newsie@darktundra.xyzBehind the Blog: Rare Books and Baseball Brain https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-rare-books-and-baseball-brain/
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaI don't talk about books on here enough. Recently started reading Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, been planning to since it dropped since I fw some of her online writing.
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"The super-rich have apocalypse fantasies of their own, built not on faith or ideology but on a calm and rational evaluation of how best to maintain their position; they would genuinely rather reign in hell than share in heaven. And they have all the money to make sure they get there."
#ClimateEmergency
@v_i_o_l_a@openbiblio.socialRezension zu "Platform Power and Libraries" (Christine F. Smith 2025, https://litwinbooks.com/books/platform-power-and-libraries/ &
@cdarwin@c.imFOX NEWS: If you're a young person and you're disenchanted, you can't afford a home, you're having trouble with healthcare & you feel failed by the economy, what is the Republican alternative?
MIKE JOHNSON: Well, the answer is not to turn everything over to the government, because that never works
(Unless it's gay marriage, abortion, guns, and what books you can read
-- then he's ok with it.)
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.dedouban: Douban friendship network (2009)
A friendship network among users on Douban.com, a Chinese website providing recommendations for books, music, and movies.
This network has 154908 nodes and 327162 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/douban…
@lpryszcz@genomic.socialI'd like to prepare more #vegetarian and #vegan food, especially from locally sourced products.
Could you recommend some #books , ideally
@callunavulgaris@mastodon.scotBrief detour while running errands today. Who knows where this is, without image searching? #ArchitecturalHistory
@Techmeme@techhub.socialTether says KPMG completed Tether's first full audit and found its 2025 financial statements fairly presented its financial position in all material respects (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/busines…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"this is #fascism with a difference. Its proponents are actively willing an apocalypse, or a wave of interconnected apocalypses brought forth by #ClimateChange and financial chaos, to hasten us towards a post-democratic world in which only a rich few survive to prosper" -- Naomi Klein
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu#PennedPossibilities 1127: What quirks do some of your characters have?
The Manager is overworked and constantly drinking tea to steady their nerves, they think they are the boss when in fact they are one voice among many. Loves their spreadsheets, order, and protocol.
The Librarian is a dear, loves their books and their library. Fussy, obsessive about detail, wears reading g…
@kazys@mastodon.socialI built a plugin to use NotebookLM in Zotero. You can upload books and articles and interact with it as you would on the web.
Link below.
1/2
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialAs thousands of authors await their cut from Anthropic's $1.5B copyright settlement, some say they are getting left out amid competing book ownership claims (Neil Vigdor/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"Part of the new shamelessness we’re seeing is just what happens when this amount of financial, mediagenic, technological and military weaponry is concentrated in the hands of this very small, unaccountable group of people. They stop trying to seduce us in any way." -- Naomi Klein
#Davos
#GazaGenocide
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.debookcrossing: BookCrossing ratings (2005)
Two bipartite networks representing people and the books they have interacted with, from the BookCrossing website. Nodes represent users and books, and an edge connects a user to a book they have interacted with. The file book_implicit is unweighted; edge weights in book_ratings give the rating a user assigned to a book.
This network has 445801 nodes and 1149739 edges.
Tags: Economic, Preferences, Unweighted, Weighted
@bourgwick@heads.sociala thing that i swear began as a jon wurster-as-marky ramone joke that i now see everywhere: referring to books as being "on" a publisher as opposed to "from" ("coming june 23rd on penguin"), as if they were albums. or maybe i just never noticed it before he used it. #books
@cdarwin@c.imThe universe gave rise to everything:
stars and cells, minds and memories, purpose and pain.
But it doesn’t care about us.
It follows its own rules.
And now, according to Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi, we finally understand enough about those rules to ask the big questions like we mean it:
Why do we exist?
Are we alone?
How did we get here?
What comes next?
And—perhaps most urgently—is there reason to hope?
Heck yeah, there is!
Dr. Ol…
@newsie@darktundra.xyzPodcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI https://www.404media.co/podcast-we-spoke-to-an-amazon-worker-destroying-books-for-ai/
@Techmeme@techhub.socialGoogle adds Expert Intelligence to Gemini Notebook, letting users import eligible titles they own in Google Play Books to ask questions, generate podcasts, more (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/985567/google-gemini-notebook-expert-sources-b…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot"This year what we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave."
#Davos
#GazaGenocide
#Gaza
@callunavulgaris@mastodon.scotMy haul from Waterstones this morning. I went specifically looking for Body Work so was delighted to find it. I didn't mean to buy the two other books. I was initially drawn in by the lovely covers, then the 'buy one get one half price' stickers. I've enjoyed many Japanese novels in translation, starting with The Makioka Sisters by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki a few years ago.
@bourgwick@heads.socialreading a '90s paperback that's kinda meh but my god it smells amazing. #books
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialA study of 14,419 self-published novels on Amazon using Pangram's AI detection tools: in 2,168 of the books, 50% of prose was AI, and in 970 books, 90% was AI (Alexandra Alter/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/books/ai-bookselling-amazon.html…
@cdarwin@c.imAI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing.
“The world's best AI training data is sit…
@cdarwin@c.imWe placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it,
and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books
https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ende…
@bourgwick@heads.socialmake no mistake, i enthusiastically huffed all 771 pages of the new velvet underground bio & will refer back to it often, but i kinda wanted a lot more. more moe! more gear/drone forensics! more roadie details! more myth busting! more yule era! more reunion! shoulda been 2 volumes, market be damned. #books
@cdarwin@c.imIn “53 Days,”
the historian Timothy W. Ryback
shows how the Nazis used democratic means to destroy German democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/01/books/review/53-days-timothy-ryback.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialGoogle adds Expert Intelligence to Gemini Notebook, letting users import eligible titles they own in Google Play Books to ask questions, generate podcasts, more (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/985567/google-gemini-notebook-expert-sources-b…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialHow the internet, smartphones, social media, and now generative AI are accelerating a drop in the reading of longer works like books (Rose Horowitch/The Atlantic)
https://www.
@bourgwick@heads.socialfor some reason, the #nyc tower records has come up a few times this week & it really all feels like a dream now, just the scale & sprawl, especially when tower books opened, too (plus, of course, other music across the street).
@cdarwin@c.imLast year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialA profile of Whitney Frick, publisher of The Dial Press, a Penguin Random House imprint specializing in books by women, some of which have stirred controversy (Anna Silman/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture…
@cdarwin@c.imBans of and challenges to reading material in K-12 schools have been on the rise since 2021,
when the American Library Association and PEN America noticed a sharp uptick in the number of books on the no-no list.
The classics of the banned-book genre remained
— “Brave New World,” “Animal Farm,”“Beloved”
— but those were joined by an escalating list of picture books of two-dad families, young-adult novels tackling race or suicide, graphic novels in which teens make inf…
