I love following Word of the Year winners. But this year, I definitely feel old. Collins Dictionary has declared its Word of the Year is “brat.” This refers to the in-your-face confidence, independence, and hedonism reflected in the attitude and behavior of figures like Charli XCX, whose album of the same name coined this meaning for the word.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Admittedly, the dictionary recognizes that this is an old word with a new twist. But as a child of the ’80s, it doesn’t feel so far removed from the attitude of Rob Lowe and the various branches of the Sheen-Estevez family that made up the Brat Pack (riffing on Sinatra and Co.’s Rat Pack), whom many teens my age idolized as they dominated the screen and the news in equal measure.
Kindle Colorsoft’s Launch and Amazon’s Growth
In less frivolous news, Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft launched last week. Amazon seems to be pleased with demand for it and the other new Kindle devices.
CEO Andy Jassy noted, “We kicked off the holiday season with our biggest-ever Prime Big Deal Days and the launch of an all-new Kindle lineup that is significantly outperforming our expectations.” This came as the company announced record third-quarter revenue of $158 billion.
Kindle Colorsoft
But the really interesting number from the figures is the $75 billion the company expects to spend on infrastructure this year. Much of that is on hardware to support its generative AI.
This is a reminder of just how expensive the servers and computing power needed to run cutting-edge AI can be. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has already said the company is struggling to do what it wants product-wise due to hardware limits.
Germany’s E-book Lending Models
Meanwhile, all major stakeholders have been gathering in Germany to try to thrash out a way forward for libraries and e-book lending in the country. It looks likely that a range of licensing models will be trialed to balance publishers’ rights, payments to authors, and enabling libraries to bring digital content to their borrowers. How libraries buy or license and then lend e-books is, of course, a longstanding global issue, so any successful pilots would be welcome news for all.
