Alexandra Alter, Authors and Booksellers Urge Justice Dept. to Investigate Amazon (The New York Times)

“The effects of the site’s rise have been profound, Open Markets Institute and the other groups argued, contributing to a steep decline in the number of physical bookstores across the United States, and leaving publishers and authors beholden to the site.

Amazon also has influenced which books readers are exposed to and buy, and has made it more challenging for lesser-known authors to gain exposure on the site, while blockbuster authors and celebrities whose books are likely to sell well are prominently featured.”

Katherine A. Powers, AI Is Coming for Your Audiobooks. You’re Right to Be Worried (The Washington Post)

“I have listened to thousands of hours of audiobooks (it’s my job), so perhaps it’s not a surprise that I sense the wrongness of AI voices. Capturing and conveying the meaning and sound of a book is a special skill that requires talent and soul. I can’t imagine ‘Archie,’ for instance, understanding, much less expressing, the depth of character of say, David Copperfield. But here we are at a strange crossroads in the audiobooks world: Major publishers are investing heavily in celebrity narrators — Meryl Streep reading Ann Patchett’s ‘Tom Lake,’ Claire Danes reading ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ a full cast of Hollywood actors (Ben Stiller, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle and more) on ‘Lincoln in the Bardo,’ to name a few. Will we reach a point where we must choose between Meryl Streep and a bot?”

Christopher Scalia, How to Justify the Study of Literature (The Public Discourse)

“In a widely discussed and very disheartening New Yorker piece this spring, Nathan Heller reported on the state of the English major and found it wanting. Perhaps the most alarming moment in the long essay came during an interview with James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University and a prominent Shakespeare scholar, who confessed his doubts about the future of the English major based on his own declining reading habits. ‘I probably read five novels a month until the 2000s,’ he told Heller. ‘If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.’ When even a prominent scholar acknowledges not only the difficulty of teaching literature to undergraduates, but also the decline of his own reading habits, the state of literary studies is dire.”