'A spokesman for HarperCollins told the Telegraph: “After careful consideration, and under the leadership of its new CEO, HarperCollins UK has decided not to publish any new titles by David Walliams. The author is aware of this decision."'

Walliams dropped by Harper Collins. The Telegraph reports that this was after an investigation launched in 2023 after a junior employee raised concerns – and later left the company.

Remember how I said I have it written into my foreign-language contracts that my work has to be translated by an actual human? This shit is why. Those book translations are gonna suck. They'll save money putting out books that are going to be painful to read. That's not a great long-term strategy.

Do I know a writer who is into ink? The kind used for books?

...whereas secrecy is well-known as a trust-building principle, and defending it with legal action even more so

... Jo Applin on Louise Bourgeois’s latex Nick Richardson on alchemy Helen Pfeifer on Suleyman the Great @alicehunt.bsky.social on James VI and I Clare Bucknell on Byron in Ravenna a poem by Anne Carson and a cover by Anne Rothenstein. Read online now at www.lrb.co.uk

More 'non'-fiction... Rachel Aviv's original New Yorker piece/exposé is here: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I'm keen to speak with any creatives who have lost work because of generative AI, for something I'm writing. If this is you, please DM me. Thank you!

bookshop book stamps. great idea.

🚨 The UK government just published a breakdown of the responses to its consultation on AI & copyright: - 95% of respondents want AI companies to pay for their training data (made up of 88% saying strengthen copyright law, & 7% saying leave it as is) 🧵 1/2

Oh god I've had a go at the legend that is Simon Winchester in @thetimes.com

Oh god I've had a go at the legend that is Simon Winchester in @thetimes.com

Wonderful obituary - and the comments from readers rightly stress his kindness. www.thetimes.com/uk/obituarie...

Sad news. When I started reviewing for Andrew Holgate at The Sunday Times back in 2009 he said, simply, 'write like Carey'. Thinking like him has always been another aspiration.

'Read by the author' seems to mean 'read by AI prompted to mimic the author's voice'. In an INSANE robotic way.

good advice

Just imagine how mind-boggling it must have been for Galileo to see these unexpected points of light, and then to realise that their change in position over subsequent days could be explained in terms of orbiting Jupiter.

Credit ghostwriters! Be transparent! (Appropriately enough...) #Ghostsarereal #Ghostsaretransparent Guidelines here for authors and publishers: societyofauthors.org/resource/gho...

Can anyone explain to me why an uncredited ghostwritten book isn't fraudulent misrepresentation under the 1967 Act? After all, it can be for academic, legal and scientific writing.

Stephanie Merritt: "Judy Murray’s agent is not saying to her, ‘Oh Judy, you’ve given birth to a famous tennis player, why don’t you have a show at the Royal Academy?’” It is, says Merritt, “a devaluing of writing as a craft that requires any professional skill”.

The point about it being common for the Booker winner's surname to have been first in the shortlist (alphabetically), and uncommon for it to be last, does actually seem important. I score it at 16-5. Surely statistically significant.

The European Commission has opened an investigation into Google over the use of publisher content for its AI products “without appropriate compensation” pressgazette.co.uk/news/europea...

Ah the Atlantic gulf that lies between em- and en-dashes! Though are American-style em-dashes creeping into UK stylesheets, especially academic?

AI: only the pros will ever disclose

fascinating thread

An extraordinarily deep and moving essay: "This texturelessness, and the filmy feeling it generates, is my synaesthetic reaction to something that, at the moment, remains uncanny: the knowledge that I am trying to parse meaning from something that, while grammatical, has no motivation to carry it."

'At the beginning of his career Daunt would visit publishing houses in tired offices at the least salubrious ends of high streets. “Now you go to a marble palace on the Thames... “They’re in the best real estate in London and all of them are saying, ‘Oh, it’s so terrible. The book is dead.’” '

Sunday Times is really backing this Get Britain Reading campaign

Listen to the podcast in all the usual places. You can download our Making Tax Digital Frequently Asked Questions in the Resources section of our website buff.ly/0FYx6zc

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

...a job I'll never stop wanting

I interviewed Tom Stoppard for The Author in 2019. Only gobbets - but as you'd expect, his were special.

..and it only needs a triple turret of 11-inch guns to look just like the Graf Spee.

...presumably on legal advice. This is going to be an unpopular view but there's a difference between 'censorship' and avoiding making defamatory statements that would be hard to substantiate, however much you may believe them to be true.

do it

Many rivers to cross and it's only my will That keeps me alive I've been licked, washed up for years, And I merely survive because of my pride.

The Bookseller has taken home the award for Content Piece of the Year at this year’s PPA Independent Publisher Award for its investigation into the crowdfunding publisher Unbound earlier this year 👇 #BookSky

Take the point, but prefer my non-fiction to be less haphazard and amateur.

'The technology secretary, Liz Kendall, has indicated she is sympathetic to artists’ demands not to have their copyrighted works scraped by AI companies without payment and said she wanted to “reset” the debate.'

Christ no I realise this sentence was even longer. And it was the week before. Mustn't get into a habit...

Just discovered that 'point-blank range' doesn't mean ultra-close. It actually means fairly close - and in fact a very specific kind of close: close enough not to have to lift the barrel of the gun a bit so as to adjust for 'bullet drop'. Love how meaning drifts as a technical term becomes a cliché.

"It’s just crazy to me to see this engine for intellectual property theft that is totally indefensible taking place with the full cooperation of Amazon.”

"A quick search on TikTok shows close to 90,000 videos and tutorials on how to make passive income on KDP with constant AI publishing"

...as we reported in The Author. Getting worse?

Must be the longest sentence I've ever published

In huge positive news, the Australian government just ruled out handing the work of their country’s creatives to AI companies for free 🙌 They resisted the well-funded tech lobby & shut down proposals to upend copyright law. Other governments should do the same! www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Must be the longest sentence I've ever published

“an endless wet nightmare of huge seas, puking, pork chops, and sexing crab” – no, that's not the book, which is excellent, it's a quote from it. I reviewed Rose George's Every Last Fish for @thetimes.com www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

Philip Jones describing ‪@thebookseller.com‬ as 'the Pravda of the book trade'!

The more I reflect on the damage the AI bubble could wreak when it bursts, the angrier I get at the credulousness that has inflated it. Especially in the media, and especially the tech media, which often seems like an industry PR machine. My lastest column. www.thenewworld.co.uk/philip-ball-...