Hacker News with Generative AI: Publishing

Who will like this book? (yrsd.life)
I recently wrote a new blurb for the novel. I didn’t hate the old one (I’ve pasted it below for reference) - although there is no doubt a professional would have done it better. If anything, the style & tone & format of my new attempt is atypical. A publishing house probably wouldn’t use this blurb because it is too frenzied, and it risks turning too many people away, right at the door.

Writing, Book Marketing, Novels, Publishing

12 points by ynlefevre 16 hours ago | 7 comments

Steve Jackson Games Is Bringing the Fighting Fantasy Books to the US (sjgames.com)
AUSTIN, TX 10/17/24 – In 1982, British game designers Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson introduced Fighting Fantasy, a revolutionary set of solo adventure books that combined nonlinear narratives with dice-rolling tabletop RPG mechanics. Now, this fantastical, multi-million-selling book series returns to the United States thanks to an historic 50-book publishing collaboration with Steve Jackson Games. The first books in the series will be available in early 2025.

Gaming, Books, Publishing, History

104 points by mattl 3 days ago | 62 comments

Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds (chemistryworld.com)
About 10% of the most influential researchers worldwide in various scientific fields, including chemistry, are achieving ‘implausibly high’ publication and new co-author rates.

Science, Research, Publishing, Academia, Chemistry

188 points by crescit_eundo 3 days ago | 112 comments

As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends it (retractionwatch.com)
The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

Science, Research, Retraction, Publishing, Academic Integrity

60 points by domofutu 9 days ago | 7 comments

Mass market non-fiction has bad incentives (borretti.me)
The problem with non-fiction, and the reason most non-fiction books are not worth reading, is the interests of the reader and writer are misaligned.

Non-fiction, Publishing, Writing, Incentives

46 points by bumbledraven 10 days ago | 36 comments

Tell HN: O'Reilly sells DRM-free eBooks again (ebooks.com)
O’Reilly’s mission is to change the world by sharing the knowledge of innovators.

Ebooks, DRM, Publishing

35 points by Kerrick 14 days ago | 4 comments

Quire – open-source multiformat publishing tool (quire.getty.edu)
Quire is an open-source multiformat publishing tool designed for longevity, discoverability, and scholarship. Using a single set of plain text files, Quire creates books as authoritative and enduring as print and as vibrant and feature-rich as the web—all without paying a fee or maintaining a complicated server.

Open Source, Publishing, Tools, Academic

13 points by amai 19 days ago | 1 comments

Books written by humans are getting their own certification (theverge.com)
Books not created by AI will be listed in a US Authors Guild database that anyone can access.

Books, Publishing, Technology, Artificial Intelligence, Authors

3 points by clumsysmurf 22 days ago | 2 comments

Fake papers contaminate world scientific literature, fueling a corrupt industry (theconversation.com)
Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale and dissemination of bogus scholarly research, undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

Science, Research, Publishing, Academic Integrity

6 points by rntn 22 days ago | 0 comments

Amazon UK to stop selling Bloomsbury's books (thebookseller.com)
Amazon UK has said that it will cease selling Bloomsbury’s print and e-books from midnight on 23rd January, saying negotiations between the giant retailer and the publisher had broken down.

Amazon, Publishing, Books, Retail

49 points by nickcotter 28 days ago | 49 comments

Tomatoes roaming the fields and canaries in the coalmine (blogspot.com)
Many publishers are getting nervous about infiltration by paper mills, who can torpedo a journal's reputation when they succeed in publishing papers that are obvious nonsense.

Journalism, Research, Publishing, Academic Integrity

132 points by mathgenius 33 days ago | 33 comments

Pagecord: Publish your writing effortlessly from your inbox (github.com/lylo)
Publish your writing effortlessly by sending an email.

Publishing, Email, Productivity, Software

23 points by Kerrick 45 days ago | 13 comments

The latest fake literary agencies (writerbeware.blog)
Fake agencies mentioned in this post:

Writing, Scams, Publishing, Literary Agents

106 points by Tomte 46 days ago | 41 comments

More Than Half of All Google Search Takedowns Now Come from Link-Busters (torrentfreak.com)
Link-Busters is the unofficial DMCA takedown champion of 2024. The anti-piracy outfit works for many of the world's largest publishing companies and is currently flagging the majority of all 'pirate' URLs to Google search; more than two billion in total. Despite this stellar effort, book pirates are chalking up new records too.

Copyright, Piracy, Google Search, DMCA, Publishing

14 points by isaacfrond 50 days ago | 0 comments

Evolution journal (Elsevier) editors resign en masse (arstechnica.com)
Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement.

Science, Publishing, Ethics, Resignation

7 points by pythonic_hell 50 days ago | 1 comments

Evolution journal editors resign en masse (arstechnica.com)
Over the holiday weekend, all but one member of the editorial board of Elsevier's Journal of Human Evolution (JHE) resigned "with heartfelt sadness and great regret," according to Retraction Watch, which helpfully provided an online PDF of the editors' full statement.

Science, Academia, Publishing, Resignations

4 points by signa11 53 days ago | 0 comments

Big five publishers have abandoned literary fiction, putting it on life support (persuasion.community)
Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.

Publishing, Literature, Fiction, Trends

19 points by dredmorbius 55 days ago | 1 comments

Evolution journal editors resign en masse to protest Elsevier changes (retractionwatch.com)
All but one member of the editorial board of the Journal of Human Evolution (JHE), an Elsevier title, have resigned, saying the “sustained actions of Elsevier are fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of the journal and preclude maintaining the quality and integrity fundamental to JHE’s success.”

Science, Publishing, Academia, Open Access

106 points by panic 56 days ago | 31 comments

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index (arstechnica.com)
The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

Science, Research, Publishing, Academic Integrity

105 points by namanyayg 60 days ago | 83 comments

Britannica Didn’t Just Survive. It’s an A.I. Company Now. (nytimes.com)
For nearly 250 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was a bookshelf-busting series of gilt-lettered tomes, often purchased to show that its owners cared about knowledge.

Artificial Intelligence, Publishing, History, Education

50 points by marban 63 days ago | 43 comments

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index (arstechnica.com)
The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals after failing to meet quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

Science, Publishing, Research, Academic Journals, Retraction

4 points by bookofjoe 63 days ago | 0 comments

Journal that published faulty black plastic study removed from science index (arstechnica.com)
The publisher of a high-profile, now-corrected study on black plastics has been removed from a critical index of academic journals amid questions about quality criteria, according to a report by Retraction Watch.

Science, Research, Publishing, Academic Integrity

6 points by speckx 64 days ago | 0 comments

The Errors of TeX [pdf] (1989) (yurichev.com)

TeX, Computer Science, Publishing

4 points by todsacerdoti 75 days ago | 1 comments

How do I pay the publisher of a web page? (sethmlarson.dev)

Web Development, Monetization, Publishing

85 points by surprisetalk 81 days ago | 136 comments

Writers condemn startup's plans to publish 8k books next year using AI (theguardian.com)
Writers and publishers are criticising a startup that plans to publish up to 8,000 books next year using AI.

Artificial Intelligence, Publishing, Writers, Technology, Controversy

4 points by bookofjoe 82 days ago | 1 comments

New hijacking scam targets Elsevier, Springer Nature, and other major publishers (retractionwatch.com)
Until recently, journal hijackers do not appear to have targeted titles from big publishers, in part because their well-known website designs made such clones easy to detect.

Scams, Publishing, Academic Publishing, Research

12 points by domofutu 86 days ago | 0 comments

Graphic novelist's Elon Musk book can't find UK or US publisher (theguardian.com)
A biography by a British graphic novelist of Elon Musk is struggling to find an English-language publisher due to feared “legal consequences”.

Publishing, Elon Musk, Biography, Censorship

5 points by nickcotter 90 days ago | 0 comments

New Comic Book: La BD de L'Avent, Le Lombard Publishing (davidrevoy.com)
A few months ago I wrote a short comic, a four-page one-shot, not about Pepper&Carrot, but about Christmas for Le Lombard publishing.

Comics, Publishing, Christmas

34 points by Tomte 91 days ago | 12 comments

Arthur Frommer, 95, Dies; His Guidebooks Opened Travel to the Masses (nytimes.com)
Arthur Frommer, who expanded the horizons of postwar Americans and virtually invented the low-budget travel industry with his seminal guidebook, “Europe on 5 Dollars a Day: A Guide to Inexpensive Travel,” which introduced millions to an experience once considered the exclusive domain of the wealthy, died on Monday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 95.