It has been some time since I reported on a survey, so maybe people are starting to recover a little from the survey fatigue that can set in sometimes. If that applies to you, then you might want to take a moment to answer some of the questions for Publishing Perspectives on a topic close to many of our hearts: awards. Which is very appropriate as we started the week with an announcement about the Selfies.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This is the chance to take part in a large-scale survey on what awards and prizes, in particular international awards and prizes, mean to you. There is a demographic segment for authors, and plenty of free text, so it's absolutely relevant to all of us. As always, I went through and answered things for myself so I could report on the areas of interest.
What the Survey Covers
It starts by asking opinions on a range of well- and less well-known prizes, while offering scope for you to add other prizes meaningful in the field you write in. It wants to know what prizes can do to appeal more and what aspects mean the most to you. Interestingly, there are no questions about the terms and conditions around AI, though you can certainly add that in the free text.
Anthropic's Book Purchases
And that inevitably brings me to AI and the subject of Anthropic. A fascinating piece in the Washington Post (thanks to Jane Friedman for the link) suggests that Anthropic have not just targeted pirate libraries for training their Claude model. They have paid for, the article suggests, around a million books at retail price (and that matters because the Anthropic settlement does not include such titles, whose deployment was ruled to be fair use).
Their reason for doing this is that they claim that in order to create the best large language model, they need all the titles, not just the ones selected by critics as the crème de la crème. Interestingly, though, Anthropic said it has no real interest in including indie titles in this mass purchase. Nice to know where we stand.
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