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Remembering Porter Anderson

News Summary: Remembering Porter Anderson and His Lasting Impact on Publishing

I was deeply saddened to read on Publishing Perspectives of the death of its editor in chief, Porter Anderson, and wanted to take a few moments to pay tribute. If you have spent any time on this column you will know how regularly I have turned to Porter’s insights even in the most recent weeks. But a source of fascinating and beautifully articulated information doesn’t begin to do justice to the role Porter played: in my life as a writer and reporter, and in the larger world we all inhabit as writers.
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Poetry Can Bypass AI

News Summary: New Study Shows Poetry Can Bypass AI Guardrails; Character AI Shifts Its Teen Strategy

Authoritarian governments—and commentators on Lord Byron alike—have long suspected poets might be the most dangerous people in society. Indeed, one of my favorite novels, Bolaño’s doorstop The Savage Detectives, has this fear at its heart. A new study has discovered there might be something in that after all. The paper, catchily titled “Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak in Large Language Models (LLMs),” can essentially be summed up by saying, “AI will teach you how to do naughty things if you ask it in poetry.”
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OverDrive Sues OpenAI

News Summary: OverDrive Sues OpenAI over ‘Sora,’ Spotify Plans Price Hike, and Speakies Debut

We’re used to AI-related lawsuits. And we’re used to those lawsuits being about copyright. And the first story today ticks those boxes, but not in the way you might expect. OpenAI is on the receiving end, as it often is. But the litigant is the distributor of digital resources to libraries, OverDrive, familiar to many of us as the platform through which indies are able to get our works into the library system.
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Tertulia

News Summary: New Tools from Tertulia and a Social Platform for Small Reading Groups

We start the week with a round-up of interesting new platforms and tools. And we begin with an expanded offering from one of ALLi’s partners, Tertulia (note to self as a theologian who spent a term studying the patristic author Tertullian, that there is but one “l”). Tertulia started life and continues to thrive as an online bookstore designed to be run differently.
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HarperCollins

News Summary: HarperCollins Writes Off Baker & Taylor Losses; Spotify Reshapes Audiobook Market; Australia Imposes Teen Social Media Ban

One of the stories I’ve mentioned a couple of times in recent weeks has been the collapse of Baker & Taylor, one of the major players in wholesale and distribution. One of the things I have wondered was what actual difference this might make. Obviously, narrowing the field in such a key area has consequences, but I was interested to note that HarperCollins has attributed a significant amount of its weak financial showing of late to the closure, with monies owed being written off.
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