“Industry figures showed that 782.7 million print books were sold last year, up 1% on 2023 although still nearly 40 million down from the peak of 2021. Growth was driven by fiction, especially fantasy, while adult nonfiction, the biggest category, fell slightly. Print editions have been challenged by both ebooks and audiobooks: The latter are growing rapidly and hit $2 billion in sales in 2024. But physical media in general are seeing a revival, with sales of CDs, vinyl, and DVDs all increasing in recent years, thanks to nostalgia and consumers’ desires to unambiguously own, rather than lease, content.
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Category Archives: Libraries
How to Browse All Digitized Titles in Chronicling America
“Chronicling America is in the process of transitioning from the legacy interface to a new interface and back-end search infrastructure. Read more about it. Through its enhanced search interface, the new Chronicling America offers more options to search the collection, as well as the ability to browse newspapers through the “All Digitized Titles” list and a new… Continue Reading
Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database
Wired – [unpaywalled] Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal – One of the most important AI copyright legal battles just took a major turn : “Meta just lost a major fight in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors suing the company for copyright infringement over how it trained its artificial intelligence models. Against… Continue Reading
In ‘a mass erasure of heritage,’ numerous historic landmarks lost in L.A.
LA Times providing free access to updates on the fires – There have been at least 24 deaths and more than 12,000 structures damaged or destroyed in the L.A.-area fires. Cal Fire reported the Palisades, Eaton, Kenneth and Hurst fires had consumed more than 62 square miles, an area larger than San Francisco. The Palisades… Continue Reading
Announcing the Public Domain Image Archive
“After the hundreds (thousands?) of hours trawling through online image collections since the PDR’s inception, we’ve decided it was time to create one of our own! We are really excited to share with you the launch of our new sister-project, the Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA), a curated collection of more than 10,000 out-of-copyright historical… Continue Reading
LLRX December 2024 Articles and Columns
December 2024 – LLRX.com® – the free web journal on law, technology, knowledge discovery and research for Librarians, Lawyers, Researchers, Academics, and Journalists. Founded in 1996. January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – by Jennifer Jenkins. AI in Finance and Banking,… Continue Reading
Frida Kahlo and Henri Matisse Enter the Public Domain
Hyperallergic: “Happy Public Domain Day! Starting today, January 1, you can legally access, adapt, remix, and republish (depending on your jurisdiction) the work of Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Robert Capa, as well as certain texts by William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. In the United States, the copyright term surrounding commissioned… Continue Reading
The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction
Persuasion – “Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told [The nation – unpaywalled]. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding. It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has… Continue Reading
NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Plus More Lists
Open Culture – includes YouTube Video: “The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets & Critics.” Related content: The 10 Greatest Books Ever, According to 125 Top Authors (Download Them for Free) 29 Lists of Recommended Books Created by Well-Known Authors, Artists & Thinkers: Jorge… Continue Reading
New law in NJ limits the banning of books in schools and public libraries
WHYY: “When Martha Hickson was the librarian at New Jersey’s North Hunterdon HighSchool, she fought against attempts to ban books that her critics labeled as inappropriate because they contained sexual content, and she became a target of book banners. “I received hate mail, shunning by colleagues, antagonism by administrators, and calls for my firing and… Continue Reading
Arkansas Law Criminalizing Librarians Ruled Unconstitutional
AP: “A federal judge on Monday struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that elements of the law are unconstitutional. “I respect the court’s ruling and will appeal,” Arkansas Attorney General Tim… Continue Reading
Introducing DiscoverGov: GPO’s New Discovery Search Tool
GPO is pleased to introduce DiscoverGov, our new, web-based search tool. DiscoverGov provides simple, one-stop searching across multiple U.S. Federal Government databases, including GPO’s Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and GovInfo. It will retrieve reports, articles, and citations while providing direct links to selected resources and publications available online. Come meet DiscoverGov as we release… Continue Reading
