Insights from Kobo Merchandisers : Mark Lefebvre, Elizabeth Hilborn & Sarah Smith-Eivemark

Is it just me, or have there been more “words of the year” than usual this year? Maybe I’ve just noticed them more. If so, that could be a result of “brain rot,” which is the word of the year for the Oxford English Dictionary. It refers to the gradual degeneration of cognitive powers in the face of social media pablum—which, of course, you will never find here! I was absolutely delighted to see that the shortlist contained one of the words I’ve used most this year: “Romantasy,” whose popularity the OED specifically attributed to the BookTok community.

On this episode of the Self-Publishing News Podcast, Dan Holloway explores Oxford’s Word of the Year shortlist, highlighting trends like "romantasy" and "lore," which reflect shifting reader and writer habits. He also covers Tumblr’s new community feature for creators, TikTok’s legal battle over its U.S. ban, and Harvard’s AI training dataset project, which raises questions about Google Books’ involvement and public domain use.

Any process that improves by being trained on a set of materials will only ever get as good as the materials it’s trained on will allow. That’s as true of machine learning algorithms as it is of human beings. This week’s news that Harvard will release a dataset of 1 million volumes for AI training highlights efforts to address inequities caused by the need for high-quality training data.