After failed negotiations with publishers, Belgium's copyright enforcement agency has ordered the Internet Archive to block access to specific books in its Open Library within Belgium or face a 500,000-euro fine. TorrentFreak reports: Back in July, the Brussels Business Court issued a sweeping ex parte site-blocking order targeting several "shadow libraries" including Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Z-Library. Unusually, the order also included the Internet Archive's Open Library, a project operated by the well-known U.S. non-profit organization Internet Archive. The order was granted based on a request from publishers and authors who claimed, among other things, that the operators of the targeted sites were difficult to identify. This also applied to the Internet Archive, which was not heard by the court before the order was issued. [...] Over the past several weeks, Internet Archive attempted to reach an agreement with the publishers, but the effort was unsuccessful. It is clear, however, that the Internet Archive believes that its use of copyrighted books for the Open Library qualifies as fair use. The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending. The detailed arguments at the center of the Belgian case are not public, but after hearing both sides, the Department for Combating Infringements of Copyright concluded that Internet Archive must take action. In a follow-up decision (PDF) published last week, the government department explicitly states that it can't rule on U.S. fair use or the Belgian equivalent, but concludes that self-blocking measures are warranted. The Internet Archive hosts the contested books and has the ability to render them inaccessible. If it refuses to do so, it may be considered a copyright infringer under local law. The final decision requires the rightsholders to supply the Internet Archive with a list of all books that should be blocked in Belgium. The non-profit then has 20 calendar days to implement the necessary measures. In addition to making the books unavailable, Internet Archive must also prevent these works from being made available for digital lending in the future.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays. And yet for all the millions of words he's published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification. The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow's telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease. Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe -- a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. "It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying," Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Doctorow's book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly. Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame

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James Marriott, writing in a column: The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. "To engage with the written word," the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, "means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning." As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution. Now, we are living through the counter-revolution. More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis. In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports "shocking and dispiriting" falls in children's reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, "books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures." [...] What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history. Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience's attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait.

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Independent UK bookshops will now be able to sell ebooks via a new platform (Bookshop.org's expansion), keeping 100% of profits and offering a non-Amazon way to reach digital readers. "Bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon," said Nicole Vanderbilt, managing director of Bookshop.org UK. "Digital readers don't depend on Amazon's monopoly any more, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org." The Guardian reports: Bookshop.org launched in the UK in November 2020 as a platform for independent bookshops to sell physical books. Bookshops receive 30% of the cover price from each sale they generate; so far, the UK site has generated 4.5 million pounds for independent bookshops. Customers will also now be able to buy ebooks through a bookshop of their choice. Profits from orders without a specified bookshop will be added to a shared pool, which will be distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform. [...] The platform will launch with a catalogue of more than a million ebooks from all major publishers. It will be available online via a web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps on Apple and Android. "Due to Amazon's proprietary digital rights management [DRM] software and publishers' DRM requirements, it's not currently possible to buy DRM-protected ebooks from Bookshop.org or local bookshops and read them on your Kindle," said Bookshop.org. However, the site is working with the e-reader company Kobo to support Kobo devices "later this year," and longer term would "love to offer our own eInk device."

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Amazon today announced three new Kindle Scribe models, its e ink-featuring tables designed for note-taking and reading. The lineup includes the standard Kindle Scribe and a version without a front light alongside the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. The new devices feature an 11-inch glare-free E Ink screen compared to the 10.2-inch display on previous models. Amazon has reduced the weight to 400 grams from 433 grams and made the devices 5.4mm thin. The company added a quad-core processor and additional memory to deliver writing and page turns that are 40% faster than earlier versions. The Colorsoft model uses custom-built display technology to offer 10 pen colors and five highlighter colors. Amazon redesigned the software to include AI-powered notebook search and summaries. The devices will support Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive for document access and allow users to export notes as editable text to OneNote. The standard Kindle Scribe will start at $499.99 and the Colorsoft at $629.99 when they become available later this year. The version without a front light will cost $429.99 and arrive early next year.

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Libraries nationwide are fielding patron requests for books that don't exist after AI-generated summer reading lists appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. Reference librarian Eddie Kristan told 404 Media the problem began in late 2022 following GPT-3.5's release but escalated dramatically after the newspapers published lists created by a freelancer using AI without verification. A Library Freedom Project survey found patrons increasingly trust AI chatbots over human librarians and become defensive when told their AI-recommended titles are fictional. Kristan now routinely checks WorldCat's global catalog to verify titles exist. Collection development librarians are requesting digital vendors remove AI-generated books from platforms while academic libraries struggle against vendors implementing flawed LLM-based search tools and AI-generated summaries that undermine information literacy instruction.

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alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: When's the last time you settled down with a good book, just because you enjoyed it? A new survey shows reading as a pastime is becoming dramatically less popular in the U.S., which correlates with an increased consumption of other digital media, like social media and streaming services. The survey was carried out by researchers from the University of Florida and the University of London, and charts a 40 percent decrease in daily reading for pleasure across the years 2003-2023, based on responses from 236,270 US adults. "This is not just a small dip -- it's a sustained, steady decline of about 3 percent per year," says Jill Sonke, director for the Center for the Arts in Medicine at the University of Florida. "It's significant, and it's deeply concerning." The number of US people reading for pleasure every day peaked in 2004 at 28 percent, the researchers found, but by 2023 this was down to 16 percent. There was a silver lining though: those people who are still reading are reading for slightly longer on average. Reading habits aren't changing across the board. The drops in reading for pleasure were higher in Black Americans, especially those with lower income, education levels, and who lived outside of cities. That speaks to problems beyond the rise of smartphones, tablets, and other screens, according to the researchers. Different life situations are leading to disparities in accessibility that don't help promote reading as a pastime. "Our digital culture is certainly part of the story," says Sonke. "But there are also structural issues -- limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity and a national decline in leisure time. If you're working multiple jobs or dealing with transportation barriers in a rural area, a trip to the library may just not be feasible." The findings have been published in the journal iScience.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark is to stop charging VAT on books in an attempt to get more people reading. At 25%, the country's tax rate on books is the highest in the world, a policy the government believes is contributing to a growing "reading crisis." The culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Wednesday that the government would propose in its budget bill that the tax on books be removed. The move is expected to cost 330 million kroner ($51 million) a year. "This is something that I, as minister of culture, have worked for, because I believe that we must put everything at stake if we are to end the reading crisis that has unfortunately been spreading in recent years," Engel-Schmidt told the Ritzau news agency . "I am incredibly proud. It is not every day that one succeeds in convincing colleagues that such massive money should be spent on investing in the consumption and culture of the Danes." [...] "It is also about getting literature out there," said Engel-Schmidt. "That is why we have already allocated money for strengthened cooperation between the country's public libraries and schools, so that more children can be introduced to good literature." [...] If prices do not fall as a result of the measure, Engel-Schmidt said he would reconsider whether it was the right course of action. "I will of course monitor how prices develop. If it turns out that abolishing VAT only means that publishers' profits grow and prices do not fall, then we must consider whether it was the right thing to do," he said. Further reading: Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Boston Public Library, one of the oldest and largest public library systems in the country, is launching a project this summer with OpenAI and Harvard Law School to make its trove of historically significant government documents more accessible to the public. The documents date back to the early 1800s and include oral histories, congressional reports and surveys of different industries and communities. "It really is an incredible repository of primary source materials covering the whole history of the United States as it has been expressed through government publications," said Jessica Chapel, the Boston Public Library's chief of digital and online services. Currently, members of the public who want to access these documents must show up in person. The project will enhance the metadata of each document and will enable users to search and cross-reference entire texts from anywhere in the world. Chapel said Boston Public Library plans to digitize 5,000 documents by the end of the year, and if all goes well, grow the project from there. Because of this historic collection's massive size and fragility, getting to this goal is a daunting process. Every item has to be run through a scanner by hand. It takes about an hour to do 300-400 pages. Harvard University said it could help. Researchers at the Harvard Law School Library's Institutional Data Initiative are working with libraries, museums and archives on a number of fronts, including training new AI models to help libraries enhance the searchability of their collections. AI companies help fund these efforts, and in return get to train their large language models on high-quality materials that are out of copyright and therefore less likely to lead to lawsuits. "Having information institutions like libraries involved in building a sustainable data ecosystem for AI is critical, because it not just improves the amount of data we have available, it improves the quality of the data and our understanding of what's in it," said Burton Davis, vice president of Microsoft's intellectual property group. [...] OpenAI is helping Boston Public Library cover such costs as scanning and project management. The tech company does not have exclusive rights to the digitized data.

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