People are getting paid for #publishing#AI-written #books, in an #author's name, when in fact the author did not, and knew nothing about this happening.
Then, when the author tries to do something about it to stop this obvious #abuse, they are told no.
A librarian helped me find the book my son requested today. She knew the plot & the characters & even pointed me to the newest story from the series in case he might enjoy that too. Then she recommended other #books he might like.
When I thanked her, she simply shook her head explaining, “It’s my job. And I really love my job!”
I share this anecdote simply bc librarians are the best people 📚✨
A bill in Louisiana, HB 777, would make it a crime for librarians to use public funds to join the American Librarian Association or attend an ALA conference, punishable with prison time and hard labor for up to two years.
The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books
Librarians are amazing.
They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.
“What an astonishing thing a book is… one glance at it & you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly & silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. #Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
There's a social reading platform called @bookwyrm which is an alternative to Amazon's Goodreads. BookWyrm is part of the Fediverse, and BookWyrm accounts can be followed from Mastodon etc. You can find out more at:
They are currently trying to get BookWyrm translated into more languages, so that more readers can use it. If you speak a language other than English, you can help translate at:
The Banned Book Club is a project of the Digital Public Library of America. You download their Palace e-reader and choose Banned Book Club as your #library. It gives you access to all (most?) of them plus others
I know I've mentioned this before but worth another one because it's amazing: You can download tens of thousands of academic books on a staggering variety of humanities and social studies topics legally for free at the OAPEN library https://library.oapen.org/
Oh my God! Oh fck! I wake up to this big news and all I can say is fck! I went to bed having read something about Philip K Dick Awards (I can't even remember what I read about it!) and I wake up to learn that my book, Where Rivers Go To Die, has been nominated for this and its a big deal to me and all I can day is f*ck! What a way to start the year!
For those new to Mastodon, here are some handy tips on getting the most out of your experience:
Follow a lot of people
Follow a lot of people
Follow a lot of people
Follow a lot of people
You can always un-follow them later, if you want to 😋
Also, click on and then follow hashtags that interest you, like #Music or #Books or #ClimateChange or especially #FollowFriday, and discover more good people to follow.
Plenty of new titles are available now and volunteers at @DProofreaders will have plenty of work ahead.
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
The Giant Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon
Some jails allow book shipments from Amazon and big-box chains, while denying book shipments from independent bookstores. Now, an independent bookstore, Avid Bookshop, has filed a lawsuit alleging that this is unconstitutional.
#OTD in 1903, Marie Curie defended her doctoral thesis in the physical sciences, entitled "Recherches sur les substances radioactives", before the Faculty of Science at the University of Paris; she was awarded a "very honourable" distinction.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. via @Wikipedia
Maria Skłodowska-Curie, ca. 1898. Portrait of Maria Skłodowska-Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934), sometime prior to 1907. Curie and her husband Pierre shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Working together, she and her husband isolated Polonium. Pierre died in 1907, but Marie continued her work, namely with Radium, and received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. Her death is mainly attributed to excess exposure to radiation. via @wikipedia
Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt.
She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Hypatia constructed astrolabes and hydrometers, but did not invent either of these, which were both in use long before she was born. In March 415 AD, she was murdered by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter.
Back in March, when the #fediverse came together to help save us, we changed our name to “Texas Observer Lives!”
Today, we changed it back to just "Texas Observer" because we need YOUR HELP to survive into 2024! It's up to our readers to preserve the voice of progressive #Texas by joining our fall membership drive.
A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.