Kathryn

yeah, it's weirdly self-righteous, or at least self-important, behaviour.

I'm sorry for your loss.

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I'm sure many of you have already seen this newish preprint on the deleterious cognitive effects of using AI for writing tasks, but just in case: arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088.... If you've been paying attention, you know/can intuit a lot of it, but it's something tangible w/ which to counter enthusiasts.

Ooh, I like that

Are they, like, holding out for E. Gordon Gee, or what?

Oh, no, you do need those boots. I think I might also need them.

It's such a nice little thing to semi-accidentally hand-sell a book.

Define it; at least one reviewer will grump about it if you don't.

Speaking of which:

We at Fortress Press are eager to read (with human eyes 👀) proposals including but not limited to:
late antique and medieval Christian history;
Jewish Studies;
Islamic Studies;
and Religious Studies broadly conceived.

Please reach out if you’re working on a project!

Solid choice. I just made myself a grilled cheese like I'm 12

have a wonderful summer, wise one!

Nearly all UPs (as opposed to scholarly presses generally, which include for-profits like Routledge) are working under incredible constraints and w/ shortfalls, as Ken Wissoker's excellent thread abt Duke made clear, but there are the "doing the best they can in spite of" ones and . . . the others.

OUP, btw, was the first of the large UK UPs to cut its in-house copy editors. This was and remains a strong signal of its general attitude to quality assurance, imo. People need to understand that as publishing labour goes, so go their own publishing processes, and choose their options accordingly.

Did I miss something (the latest iteration of that dumbass screed) or are we just doing general venting?

And the stupid cyclicality of it is exhausting (as you suggest, this is not fundamentally new backwardness). We just get a few decades of halting progress under our feet, and here come the eugenics and the reactionary gender ideologies and the environmental despoliation again . . . (here too, fwiw)

I can tell you that as a real live human copy editor for a journal, I take four passes over every piece I touch—two while I'm making suggested edits, two when author changes come back—and every genuine professional will be similarly committed to taking care with your work. AI won't.

Book acquisitions, I meant, sorry. Where I see this stuff used and talked about most is in or in relation to production, already an area where houses are forever looking to cut costs. (AI does not, of course, actually do that, as you point out.)

Really, seriously: Please do shop around for presses committed to using human hands in book and journal production (there are lots like MHRA still holding that necessary line). You're going to have a *much* better publishing experience that way.

Yes, I was going to say. (As far as I know, no one is yet using this stuff in acquisitions, thankfully.) Still bad, though, and consistent with broader trends in UK publishing particularly.

Third-party for-profit companies that offer packaged book production services—sometimes just layout and printing, sometimes also including things like design and copy editing. Presses lean on them to varying degrees because they cut prod costs. They make up about 40% of the overall industry now.

(The other problem with them tends to be greater-than-average use of packagers, which are terrible from a labour perspective and also more likely than not to make absolute slop of your page proofs.)

When I say "please don't publish with the big British houses if you can help it, because they're going hard for LLM nonsense that disrespects everyone's labour and expertise," this is the kind of nonsense I mean (h/t @shannanclark.bsky.social): www.alpsp.org/news-publica...

These people are so deeply unserious that their unseriousness sort of defies processing

Yes, which is one reason the thread is great. (Somewhat similarly, it's Muse that makes Hopkins its money, in fact.) Faculty often have no idea of the complicated system of offsets that keep the whole rickety machine moving, and do not, in my experience, want to investigate on their own.

Co-signing! That people commonly make this claim is, of course, partly the fault of institutions that pressure scholars to frame every bit of writing they do as high stakes, a novel "intervention," instead of treating scholarship as the accretive process it is. But it's still a silly tack to take.

(And keep in mind this is Duke, whose titles are often much buzzed about—so what is the situation of smaller presses with even smaller ops budgets that don't tend to get the same level of notice, do you think?)

Among other things, this thread is useful for dispelling the persistent assumption that university presses are out here making a killing because they're pricing paperbacks ten dollars higher than folks might like. . . . Please do read for a view of the actual economics.

It's rough being a humanities editor rn. At a conference last weekend, someone asked if, that being so, I was thinking of diversifying into business. I said no: for one thing I'd spent 10 yrs on it. For another, it feels vital now to support humanist scholarship people can teach & read & learn from.

The people like bird pics