Bookbrowse News About Books, Authors, and Book-Related Topics

On March 25, U.S. District Court judge Stephen Locher of the Southern District of Iowa reinstated an injunction against book restrictions in Iowa Senate File 496, a 2023 state law that has resulted in the removal of hundreds of books from Iowa public school libraries. Locher concluded "that Senate File 496 is likely facially unconstitutional under the First Amendment," enjoining state defendants against enforcing the law's provisions to remove library books and penalize educators.

A lawsuit brought by publishers and authors including John Green and Jodi Picoult has led to a portion of a law banning Iowa school libraries and classrooms from carrying books depicting sex acts being halted.

Australian authors say they are "livid" and feel violated that their work was included in an allegedly pirated dataset of books Meta used to train its AI.

The parent company of Facebook and Instagram is being sued by authors in the United States, including Ta-Nehisi Coates and the comedian Sarah Silverman, for copyright infringement.

For 120 years, the Haskell Free Library & Opera House has straddled the Quebec-Vermont border, offering equal access to Canadians and Americans alike, passport-free. That was the vision of its founder, the philanthropist and dual-citizen Martha Haskell, who believed in friendship between the two countries.

As of next week, that remarkable run of binational harmony will come to an end when U.S. authorities cut off Canadian access to the grand turreted building, a decision announced on Thursday evening.

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren't thrilled with their options. This "seems unreasonably expensive," wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records.

In a March 14 executive order, the Trump Administration is seeking to eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." The EO states that the IMLS—along with six additional entities including the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution—"shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law."

On Saturday, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's request for public comment regarding the development of the Administration's Artificial Intelligence Action Plan. In their submission, the AAP emphasized the critical role of copyright protections in maintaining American leadership in AI markets.

PEN America has announced that two of its tentpole spring events—the World Voices Festival and Literary Awards—will return this year. The festival and awards were canceled in 2024 after a number of authors withdrew from participation in protest of the organization's response to the war in Gaza.

It has not been easy for smaller independent publishers to prosper in the post pandemic world. Rising costs coupled with flat industry sales have forced them to seek savings, often by limiting marketing efforts. And while larger houses can use acquisitions to create better operating efficiencies to protect their bottom lines, most indie presses don't have that option. So in February a number of indie publishers formed two groups, the Stable Book Group and Publishers Cooperative, to share resources. "Publishers Cooperative is about collaboration to maximize economies of scale," says Ulysses Press owner Keith Reigert, who is involved with both groups.

Library Futures, a nonprofit organization that addresses library policy and digital access, has released a report on the censorship of e-resources used by students for classroom research. Neo-Censorship in U.S. Libraries: An Investigation Into Digital Content Suppression details the targeting of educational databases and the rise of legal challenges against libraries, reminding readers to look beyond the print books that are the tangible symbols of the freedom to read.