The Summer Slowdown is Here

Summary

---

Book Riot Podcast — "The Summer Slowdown is Here"

Hosts: Jeff O’Neill & Rebecca Schinsky
Date: June 1, 2026
Theme: A laid-back episode reflecting the quiet pace of summer in publishing, with discussion focused on the publishing industry’s seasonal lull, AI’s impact on books and audiobooks, bookstore news, reader experiences, and thoughts on book “modernization.”

---

Episode Overview

With summer arriving, publishing news slows, signaling what Jeff dubs the seasonal “summer slowdown.” Jeff O’Neill and Rebecca Schinsky embrace a more relaxed, catch-up mode, discussing the current industry lull, creative community initiatives, Barnes & Noble’s evolving statements on AI-generated books, challenges posed by unauthorized AI audiobooks and summaries, trends in audiobook consumption, the debate over “updating” books for new generations, and their own recent reads.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Summer Lull in Publishing

• Publishing industry slows for summer:
  • “You can definitely feel summer Fridays in publishing started this week.” (Jeff, 01:06)
  • “The publishing year is… on, you know, half mental vacation really until early September when we start to get the National Book Award long list.” (Rebecca, 01:57)
• Community reading for the summer:
  • Hot Greek Summer & The Odyssey Readalong: As news slows, Book Riot invites listeners to a Patreon readalong of The Odyssey, kicking off with “Hot Greek Summer.”
    • “First read along is gonna be the Odyssey… suggested reading schedule… different translations… light background info… communal reading experience that works for us and you all together.” (Rebecca, 03:16–04:23)

---

2. Book Awards & Industry Calendar

• Late award announcements:
  • Recap of confusion over industry timing:
    • “I have declared that we’re done with 2025 book awards season. And I’ve been wrong every time…” (Rebecca, 06:14)
    • “Why is Barnes and Noble not announcing a 2025 book award until late May of 2026? What are we doing?” (Rebecca, 06:14)
• End of awards season:
  • Lingering anticipation for Women’s Prize results:
    • “Maybe the Women’s Prize still hasn’t been announced. There’s like something out there.” (Jeff, 08:30)

---

3. Barnes & Noble and AI-Generated Books

The Ongoing Controversy

• James Daunt’s shifting statements:
  • Recap: B&N’s CEO continues to muddy the waters, rather than provide simple reassurance about not selling AI books.
  • “If it’s marked as AI, we’re going to sell it… We’re just the middleman, essentially.” (Jeff, 09:06)
  • “[He says] in short, we don’t sell AI books and don’t expect to ever sell them. But reputable publishers and customer demand…” (Jeff, 10:27)
  • “Just say, I don’t see a world right now. We’re going to sell AI books.” (Jeff, 11:12)
• Rebecca’s assessment:
  • “If that had been the whole statement, you’re good… Most customers want to hear you’re safe… Just assure your consumers that the product they think they’re getting is the product they’re getting.” (Rebecca, 11:24)

B&N’s Defense: “Book Banning” Comparison

• Problematic framing:
  • “Then Daunt decides… to connect something I want to defend with book banning…” (Jeff, 15:37)
  • “A store not carrying a book and a government entity… those are different things. If Barnes and Noble doesn’t want to sell a book, they are not banning that book.” (Jeff, 16:09)
  • “Private businesses are not subject to the same kind of regulation… A store saying they’re not going to carry your books is a business decision.” (Rebecca, 17:01)
• Advice for B&N:
  • “Stop talking about it… don’t hook decisions… around things that are not related to free speech.” (Rebecca, 18:18)

---

4. Support for Indie Bookstores: Gladys Books and Wine

• Community highlight:
  • Gladys Books and Wine (Brooklyn) is raising funds after repeated flooding. “[They’re] trying to raise $60,000. If you’ve got a couple of bucks… important work in the book space…” (Rebecca, 18:51)

---

5. AI & Unauthorized Audiobooks:

The Piracy Problem

• AI-generated, pirated audiobooks are flooding platforms:
  • “AI is capable of producing audiobooks of copyrighted material at scale… major content platforms do not have the responsibility… nor are they very interested…” (Jeff, 19:52)
• Platforms’ incentives:
  • “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the strategy. The incentive here for YouTube is to get people onto their platform…” (Rebecca, 22:05)
• Need for regulation:
  • “This is a loophole that needs to be closed in legal ways… Make the platforms responsible…” (Rebecca, 22:06)
• AI-generated summaries flooding podcasts:
  • “Happening in the podcast space too… AI-generated summaries of best selling books… chart on the Apple podcast books chart… AI summary that’s 40 minutes long…” (Rebecca, 23:45; 26:31)

Coping & Counter-Measures

• Human touch as authenticity:
  • “There’s a shift away from really glossy, highly produced… because consumers are skeptical that those things are AI… there’s incentive to let it be a little bit messy.” (Rebecca, 25:19)
• Verification & platforms:
  • “YouTube’s probably going to need to do some kind of human identity verification… It’s too easy to make money doing nefarious things…” (Jeff, 24:26)

Quote of Note

• “No one would generate this hairline. Like, that’s not something someone would do.” (Jeff, 25:53)

---

6. Audiobooks: Spotify’s Uptick and Audible’s Challenge

• Spotify making big moves:
  • “Audiobook listening is up 60% year over year… a million people have paid for the Audiobooks Plus membership… more than half... just started doing it in the last year.” (Rebecca, 28:15)
  • “They are unlocking new audiobook listeners… they have grown the pie, instead of just gotten a bigger slice of it.” (Rebecca, 29:44)
• All audio (music, podcasts, audiobooks) is in competition for ears:
  • “Pretty much headphone friendly content is competing for the same time.” (Jeff, 29:44)
• Amazon’s response lags:
  • “Audible is going to regret… being slow to make changes to the platform… they started panicking as soon as Spotify announced this…” (Rebecca, 33:37)

---

7. Modernizing and Updating Books – Where Is the Line?

• “Pretty Little Liars” and modernization:
  • Sara Shepard’s YA novel is being updated with references to TikTok and Instagram, replacing Fear Factor and older sites.
  • “Let the books be the books. It fundamentally changes our understanding of the writing and the life of that book because that’s not the world these books were written into.” (Jeff, 37:41)
  • “I cannot get super motivated to say… yes we should update all these things just based on technology.” (Rebecca, 42:09)
• Useful versus unnecessary updates:
  • “Judy Blume’s ‘Forever’ has been updated to reflect changes in period products—a meaningful, instructional change for young readers.” (Rebecca, 41:42)
• The value of encountering other times:
  • “Reading books from different times… is really your best way of encountering how people once lived… it’s a feature, not a bug, that they are of their time.” (Jeff, 39:45)
  • “Let’s just not do this at all except for things like period products or where it really makes a substantive difference.” (Rebecca, 43:02)

---

8. Recent Reads & Bookish Talk

Rebecca’s Current Book

• Whistler by Ann Patchett (Not Finished Yet)
  • “It’s Ann Patchett. It’s great so far… Opens with a woman in her mid-50s… running into her former stepfather… unpacking childhood experiences.” (Rebecca, 46:20–47:49)
  • “You feel like you’re in good hands from page one with Ann Patchett.” (Rebecca, 47:49)
  • “June 2nd is the perfect day to release an Ann Patchett book.” (Rebecca, 49:30)

Jeff’s Recent Listen

• Big Fan by Mike Schur and Joe Posnanski (Audiobook)
  • “Did I enjoy it and rip through it? Yes… not a perfect book… hearing them talk and have back and forth… about their friendship… sports and fandoms…” (Jeff, 50:57)
  • “Fun audio experience, especially… worth the price of admission for their trip to the dart World Championships.” (Jeff, 53:41)

Humorous Tangent: Book Collecting

• Mike Schur’s humblebrag:
  • “I got to the point where every book by all my favorite authors in first edition. So I stopped.” (Jeff, 55:35)

Collecting Philosophy

• Rebecca: “The list for me is probably like 10 books long… I’m not that attached to books as objects.” (Rebecca, 57:45)
• Jeff’s “egg wash” metaphor:
  • “There’s a little bit of like, you know, when you put the egg wash on the croissant, it seems fancier than it actually is. This is sort of putting the egg wash on your book…” (Jeff, 58:23)

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On industry pacing:
  • “Let’s all catch up on our reading and nobody make any big moves. Keep… let’s everybody be cool.” (Rebecca, 01:57)
• On book updating:
  • “If the difference between someone getting through your book and not is that… your book isn’t good enough.” (Jeff, 42:13)
• On the current AI copyright loophole:
  • “It just needs to be regulated. This is happening in the podcast space too… AI-generated summaries of bestselling books…” (Rebecca, 22:06)
• On business decisions vs censorship:
  • “Private businesses are not subject to the same kind of regulation… So I do not appreciate a retailer muddying the waters that are already muddier than they should be…” (Rebecca, 17:01)
• On authentic audio editing:
  • “There’s incentive now to like leave your filler words in podcasts… evidence of a real person and that there’s thinking happening.” (Rebecca, 25:19)

---

Timestamps for Major Segments

• Publishing Lull, Hot Greek Summer Readalong: 01:06–05:27
• Award Calendar Griping: 06:14–08:30
• Barnes & Noble, Daunt and AI Books: 08:30–18:18
• Gladys Books and Wine Community Support: 18:51–19:52
• AI & Unauthorized Audiobooks/AIs in Podcasting: 19:52–27:58
• Spotify’s Audiobook Surge, Audible's Stagnation: 27:58–35:09
• Modernization of Books & Literary Time Travel: 35:09–45:10
• Recent Reads: Whistler & Big Fan / Book Collecting: 46:06–59:21
• Show Wrap-Up, Listener E-mail Tangent: 59:21–60:24

---

The Takeaway

This relaxed summer episode finds the Book Riot hosts balancing the light news cycle with thoughtful, conversational explorations of the issues affecting readers and the industry: from the perils and pervasiveness of AI-generated content, to the ongoing skirmishes over updating classic and contemporary books, and the mounting competition in audiobooks. Throughout, Jeff and Rebecca bring signature warmth, humor, and critical insight—offering plenty to ponder for engaged readers, even as the publishing world takes a seasonal breather.

Transcript

[Apple Watch Narrator]

If we knew more about our sleep, what would we do differently? Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep? With Sleep Score, Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions and sleep duration. Then every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score from 1 to 100. So you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from okay to very high. Know your sleep score With Apple Watch iPhone 11 or later required when you

[Canva Advertiser]

finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This is the Book Riot Podcast. I am Jeff o' Neill and I am Rebecca Schinsky and it's summertime. Rebecca, we were just talking about how it's going to be a little bit lighter here for a while. We have to do I'm not quite into my got to dig up some links to talk about era like I come sometimes get to in June and July but you can definitely feel summer Fridays in publishing started this week. Well actually maybe last week. Usually it's the the Friday after Labor Day but I think they start pushing that up. For those of you don't know, in a lot of the publishing world, noon on Fridays is see you later which is great I guess maybe something you use in your union negotiations. Hachette something in the future. I do wonder about which we could talk about but the the news is pretty slow Rebecca. So it's going to be a leisurely, briefer kind of maybe episode.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I mean we've had it. Last week was packed. There was so much AI stuff going on. We've had a lot of things to talk about. But it will just be a little quieter here through the summer. Who knows. Surprises happen all the time. There will inevitably be stuff but the publishing year is in is on, you know, half mental vacation really until early September when we start to get the National Book Award long list. So between now and then it's just let's all catch up on our reading and nobody make any big moves. Keep let's everybody be cool.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That that last Tuesday in August has turned into actually a pretty interesting new release week because people are trying to get ahead of that first September Tuesday, which I think is the biggest day of the publishing year now, is that first Tuesday in September. So we tend to see it a little bit over there. Maybe we'll get some announcements on the other side. If you are looking for ways to fill the lazy, hazy days of summer, can we interest you in Hot Greek Summer? You can come join us over on the zero to well, read Patreon, which we are going to do a read along of the Odyssey. And Rebecca. I definitely know what the schedule is for that and what I'm supposed to do and what's happening. But since I'm so sure, since I'm so sure about it and I don't need to refresher, why don't you go ahead and refresh your memory about what we're gonna be doing?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, yes, yes. You will have calendar invites for everything that is required of you. Don't you worry. We did just announce this week that that first read along is gonna be the Odyssey. There's a suggested reading schedule that's going to come out next week. By the time you're listening to this, it'll be on Wednesday, June 3. That suggested reading schedule, along with some info about different translations, how to pick a transl, very light background info on June 16th is really when the action starts happening. That's when we will drop an exclusive mini episode for our Patreon participants where we talk about, you know, what to look for as you're starting to read the Odyssey, any tips and tricks that we have, we will be recording that as we have finished recording our whole Odyssey episode. So we're just going to be like fully in Hot Greek summer. And on June 16th as well, we'll be opening a private chat space for Patreon participants to be able to talk with us each other as they go. You can read at whatever pace you like. We're just going to offer a suggested schedule and some sort of guide posts and conversation stuff along the way. But a ton of folks have joined the Patreon since we announced that. We're really excited to have new members and to have to test this out and see how it goes, but moreover, to construct a communal reading experience that works for us and you all together. So first pancake. Hopefully we'll all have a good time, but we're going to be learning some stuff. This is just the first one we're doing. So who knows if this is the way that we'll do future ones, but we are then gonna do one roughly every season for all sorts of things. But Hot Greek summer was too fun to pass up. And I've got like, we're at peak nerd in my house. We have got five different copies of the Odyssey from three different translators.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm not sure which is weirder. Three different. Three different translations or multiple copies of a couple of translations.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I couldn't find my Fitzgerald from college, so I bought a new Fitzgerald and then I found the old one. I've got the Emily Wilson. It turned out Bob had the Emily Wilson. Like we. There's, you know, we're. And there's a Fagels floating around. So we're gonna. We're gonna get into it. But hot Greek summer will be well underway.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Does. Does, does the Odyssey count as books about ships for Bob's. Is this go into his. Is this too adjacent or is it too far away? It's a lot of rowing. I'm not sure where he's.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

A lot of rowing rows. Yeah, I. I think it should count. Maybe I will tell him that Claire Danes narrates the audio version of the Emily Wilson translation. That might get him to pop that one in.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's pretty cool. Yeah. Also coming to the Patreon for this show next week, as you're hearing. This will be this week. I guess the Patreon episode will be our fantasy league retrospective crowning. And our draft for 2026, which, because of the way publishing works, is our first chance to have a crack at books that have been out for six months, essentially.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right. Last week, I think three times this year, I have declared that we're done with 2025 book awards season. And I've been wrong every time because last week Barnes and Noble just did their Children's and YA Book Awards for 2025. And I want to say I am only making this exception for the Pulitzers now because they have to deal like the Pulitzers are dealing with journalism, so they cann all the journalism of the year until the year is over. But publishing knows what books are coming out. They can. Like, you've got to pay to submit your stuff. They can submit galleys early. Like, why. Why is Barnes and Noble not announcing a 2025 book award until late May of 2026? What are we doing?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, so anyway, that would be interesting. What is the last. What's the last mouse onto the Noah's Ark of 2025 award or best of season? Like, is it the mouse?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think we're done, but I'm afraid to say it.

[Home Depot Advertiser]

Make every get together chill this Memorial Day, get up to an extra thousand dollars off select top brand appliances like LG Plus. Get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer and host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cubed ice and crushed ice. Shop Appliance Savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot offer valid May 14th through June 3rd US only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See store online for details.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Spring just slid into your DMs. Grab that boho, look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling Ross Work your magic Expedia and visit Scotland Invite you to come Step into centuries of history that await in Scotland. Castles steeped in legend. Walk along cobblestone streets. Come share the warmth of stories passed down through generations. This is a place with a past that is fully present today and all yours to explore. Plan your Scottish escape [e-mail] visitscotland I

[Jeff O'Neill]

think maybe the women's prize still hasn't been announced. There's like something out there. I don't remember what it is, but that's the one that comes immediately to mind anyway. Tough. Very tough. It's gotten worse, not better. Speaking of things have gotten worse, not better, James Daunt continues to this is what happens when you've been giving interviews for four years essentially on the KKR publicity, not kkr. I forget whatever the number of the private equity that bought them, you've been publicizing the things aren't that bad. Things are going well. You're you know, you're on goodwill tours. You're talking about the success Barnes Noble has had. Like it has had success. Like it's been going great.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes, the ship has what I think

[Jeff O'Neill]

sometimes success hides problems and the the welcoming of Barnes and Noble into the main of good book people that really has been dance project the last several years I think has tricked him into thinking that mostly these interviews are going to go okay. Rebecca because he stepped on the AI landmine and then jumped from that one onto a booby trapped landmine into a raging fire. Because we talked about this last week, that's the only a story we're doing this week said in that in that comment we were talking about. Essentially he was saying if it's marked as AI, we're going to sell it. What we don't want to do is bait and switch. You say it's AI we can put on the COVID The buyer is going to know what they're going to do. We're just the middleman, essentially. That's. That's fine. People didn't like that. You and I talked about why they may not like that. We even suggested some PR strategies. Unfortunately, we've definitive proof that James does not listen to this episode, because if he did, he would have heard us say, all you really have to say is, to our knowledge, we're not selling them now. We're not really interested in selling them. And until something really changes, I don't see that being part of our business. That's it. End of story. I don't think any controversy out of that. Rebecca, am I wrong? You think that's kind of the end of the line?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, that would have been the end of it. It's like it's not happening now. Yeah, that is not what he did.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So what he did instead was, well, as long as it comes from reputable publisher and clients want it and it's labeled. So all these caveats ending with, in short, we don't sell AI books and don't expect to ever sell them. But reputable publishers and customer demand for, no, just say we don't expect to sell them. You can always change. No one's going to be like, you know what you said six years ago, James Daunt is you were never selling that new imprint from. I'm not going to name any publisher here that's AI labeled and people, they're selling Night Hotcakes. And all you would do then is say, you know what? We're shocked. We feel good about this. People want them. We're going to carry. You don't have to preemptively take the pain for that. Just say, I don't see a world right now. We're going to sell AI books.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's it?

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's all you had to say?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. He could have just like he got the chance to clarify and he could have just clarified.

[Jeff O'Neill]

He didn't. What he. What did he do? What did he do, though? Rebecca, like, honestly, what's your understanding of what the difference is here?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean, I think he. He tried to clarify by saying that we don't endorse it. We don't intentionally sell AI generated books. We take active measures to exclude them from our online offerings, and we never knowingly order any for in store stock. If that had been the whole statement, you're good. Yeah, it's not happening. Now we know people are freaked out about it. You shouldn't be able to find AI generated books at Barnes and Noble online or in store. And if you do, that's a fluke and we'll figure it out. That's what I think most customers want to hear right now is like, right now you're safe from it in Barnes and Noble stores. And when you're shopping online, you're not going to click on something that you think is by a real person and discover later that it's AI generated and they just stuck a person's name on it. Just assure your consumers that the product they think they're getting is the product that they're getting. The rest of the mealy mouth stuff is like, it's when you've been doing PR things for too long.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And you're like, but then they're going to ask me about the future. And then what if in the future we change our minds? Well, then I want to have some cushion against it. Like you are, as you just said, allowed to change your mind in the future.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Not under oath here. I mean, I don't this a business.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like, yeah, we exist in capitalism and he is running a business. And so if there is, as he said in the first statement, if someday there is enough demand for some AI generated book that Barnes and Noble thinks it makes business sense to carry it in their store, they can assess that, like, cross the bridge. When you come to it, man, you don't need to talk about the fact that maybe someday you're going to build the bridge and just let it be. Just let that be what it is. Let people know that right now here's what's happening. And like, I mean, I don't know some of it. It's also speculative.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Like, yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I haven't heard any mainstream publisher speculate that maybe someday they'll have imprints that are openly and willingly publishing AI generated books. I don't think anybody in mainstream publishing wants to be in that business.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't think so. That's not why most people got into this business. Like, that's the thing about publishing and

[Rebecca Schinsky]

publishing as we were talking about last week too. Like, it serves an increasingly important gatekeeper function to be vetting the quality and the human generatedness of these works. Like, if you want an AI generated book, you can prompt Chat GPT to write one for you right now. And people are getting run off of booktok for talking about how they've done that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

So like it's already happening. I don't think that the industry is interested in engaging in that at all. And I'm happy to hear that. But like, why not just say we're not doing it?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And then if it changes in the future, you can talk about how it changes. But I'd be so surprised if we're in a situation any time in the, I don't know, next decade where AI books are good enough and customers are excited and open to them in a way that would prompt Barnes and Noble to have to seriously consider this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Have you ever heard this story? I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I think about it more often than I should. Maybe it's my Roman Empire. I don't know. When they were trying to get funding for the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, they had a bunch of scientists come up before whatever commission. I don't know if it's European Union or whatever, asking about the dangers. Right. And one of the scientists who study particle physics was asked or suggested, you know, there what. You happen, you do this thing together and you might. We don't know what's going to happen. Maybe you'll get a singularity or something like this, like, which is a little black hole. And then one. Then one of the, you know, God bless them, one of the Belgian representatives or whatever raised their hand and said, wait a minute, a little black hole?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Is that a possibility?

[Jeff O'Neill]

What? I mean, a little black hole. What would be the. What would be the. You know. Well, it wouldn't be a huge one, just enough to sort of. It would probably, you know, maybe most of Europe, but the world. Wait a minute, that's most of Europe. And so the scientists, like, oh, it's just a very remote possibility. And it was like.00,000, like really small probability. But because he was trying to be forthright, in that case, he should write, you're under oath. You're doing this thing. But everyone sounds like there's a chance this is going to have. Create a black hole that destroys most of Europe. That's not really the story. Really. The story here is Barnes and Noble is not interested. They're not proactively doing this. But they also know the world is changing. And then. But that's not even my least favorite part of this. Then Don decides, you know, what's good cover now is to connect something I want to defend with book banning. So here's what he says. The book banning is as clear. Is a clear and present danger. So we are very careful with demands to ban any books as also in our vigilance not to sell AI generated books that masquerade to be by real authors.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

What does that even mean?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Which, which is just saying we are good, what we do is for the good, trust us. Because we're also on the book banning vanguard. But we have to remember and we, we're, we play both sides of this fence too. It's not really playing both sides. We distinguish between a store not carrying a book and a government entity. Be that a library, a school, saying that's not part of our. Those are different things. If Barnes Noble doesn't want to sell a book, they are not banning that book. They are not. If a school board is told, if a school or teacher is told they cannot carry that book, they cannot assign it, they can't occur. That is censorship. Banning. At least by my definition. I'll say. And I think our own shared working definition. But we are not on the side of saying a bookstore has to carry something or else they're banning it. I don't believe that. Yeah, you don't have to go to that store. That's not how it works.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Private businesses are not subject to the same kind of regulation that the pub. That public entities and the government are. And so I mean we talk about this perpetually around freedom of speech, book banning, censorship, all of that stuff that like a store saying they're not going to carry your books is a business decision. We saw it come up in MeToo where bookstores were deciding they weren't going to carry books by certain authors because of those authors behavior and the business owners values did not align with what they perceived to be coming out of those authors. So they've decided not to carry those books. That's a, that is a perfectly acceptable and legal decision. And no one's rights have been infringed. When the government or like, or a government entity, like a school board says you cannot teach this book or you can't have it in your building. That's an infringement on First Amendment rights. And those are just different conversations to have. And I do not appreciate a retailer muddying the waters that are already muddier than they should be in the public's understanding of these things.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, so I didn't love that. I think James do maybe should just be quiet and it's. I don't know what he could say now because all this is out in the water and it's very.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Stop talking about it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Just stop talking about it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Stop talking about it. There will be a new AI story soon because that's the landscape that we're living in. And don't hook the decisions that you're making around things that are not related to free speech issues into potent free speech issues. Like let us not confuse those things so that those major issues can be addressed on their own. Like it is not Barnes and Noble saying, you know what, we're not going to carry that book because it's offensive to people. That would be a problem.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right, let's see, where do you want to go next, Rebecca? Anything.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Let's do a shout out. Speaking of independent bookstores that are doing good work in the community, there's a wonderful store called Gladys Books and Wine in Brooklyn. We've highlighted it on this site before. They do they're black owned, queer focused and they do a lot of feminist and queer focused programming. A really important source of community and support for folks in Brooklyn. They have been impacted by repeated flooding and there's just been a lot of damage to the store. So they have launched a GoFundMe to raise money to both remediate the flood damage and also take preventive measures so that future big rainstorms will not cause the same kind of damage to them. So we'll have a link in the show notes. They're trying to raise $60,000. At the time we're recording now they're at over 55. So they're on track to meet or exceed their goal. But if you've got a couple of bucks that you want to throw towards a local business that's doing important work in the book space, there's a link for you in the show notes to do that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I lied. Rebecca, we're doing another AI story here. This is on the this is Alexander. Alexandra Alter is reporting for the Times. A couple days ago actually last week it's been, I've been seeing circulated people are linking to this because it's hitting a different part of the book ecosystem that isn't about well, what if the robots can write Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, which we'll put that to the here. What AI and LLMs can do is digital things at scale and they will be putting stress on all parts of our society that takes digital as input. So in this particular space is there's a combination of factors. One, that AI is capable of producing audiobooks of copyrighted material at scale and that the major content platforms do not they do not have the responsibility right now legally to be really good about watching for this. Nor are they very interested at the same time. And people can make money off in this case uploading John Grisham's newest book as an unauthorized AI audiobook and get 100,000 views and make a couple hundred bucks off of it and you can set up scripts and now you can use Open Claw and all these agents to make this where you, the automated part of this is now out of control. Like you could have done this before. You could have made your own audiobook of the Widow by John Grisham and uploaded it and like tried to get some money on it. But now you don't need to do that. Like you barely have to do any of the work because this digital making of stuff, especially if it doesn't need to be good, which these audiobooks clearly aren't good. It even says in this article here, which put a link in the show notes too. I think it's one of those things where the law is going to have to change. I think these platforms ultimately it's going to have to be. We're going to have to pin the tail on them, the donkey of their monetized like they are. They are benefiting from this too and they have AI and LMS they could use. They have sucked up all the copyrighted stuff anyway. Just go cross check it. Like the we can't do it, it's too much is no longer an answer. I'm done with that. I'm done with that. With these platforms you have, you have to do this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

One of the longest standing, like most applicable statements about social media platforms in general is show me the incentive and I'll show you the strategy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And that goes way back to the launch of Facebook. But the incentive here for YouTube is to get people into their platform. And the incentive for YouTube creators to, is to make money quickly by getting views from things that people are searching for. And so like this is a loophole that needs to be closed. It needs to be closed in legal ways that I agree put the. Make the platforms responsible for saying like no, you cannot upload. Like you can't sit in your garage and read the new John Grisham book and create an audiobook. Therefore you can also not put it into, you know, some AI generated thing and produce an audiobook that you slap up on YouTube with AI slop images for 13 hours and you'll get, you won't get a ton of traffic to it, but you'll get enough to make some money and it will not have taken you, as you were saying, very long to do it. And that just needs to be regulated. This is happening in the podcast space too. There are AI generated summaries of best selling books that People are searching for those bestselling books. I've seen it happen with the Let Them Theory. I've seen it happen with I Think I Will Tell youl How to Be Rich, a couple of those really big ones. They will chart on like the Apple podcast books chart. And it's like, wait, the Let Them Theory. And it looks like the Audible book cover, but that's not. You know her name? Nope, it's not Mel as the author of this podcast. And when you click on it to hear it, it's like a 15 minute robot summary of the book. If, I mean, I've not read the Let Them Theory, I don't know if they're actually successfully summarizing that book or not. But people are searching for them on those platforms and the AI generated summaries and AI generated audiobooks are getting enough traffic to like to make it worth having monetized it for people. Like you're spending, I don't know, 10 minutes. So any money you make is going to be profit on it. That's a compelling incentive for people who are willing to walk through the loopholes. And it's just a problem all. It's a problem all the way around, but really a problem on those platforms. Like somebody's got to look at that and be like, this is not a, this is not a real summary of this. This is not a service to the listener, to the consumer that's coming to our platform. And until they. We figure it out, like we all just have to really be vigilant about what you're clicking on, right?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I think probably, you know, Spotify started to do this. I think we covered this a little bit in our last segment about, our last show about AI stories like a verified badge. YouTube was probably going to need to do some kind of human identity verification. Like I think that's the days where you could have a thousand anonymized YouTube accounts and start monetizing pretty quickly based on just numbers. I think those days should be over. And I think under a different regulatory environment, those days will be over. It's too easy to make money doing nefarious things. And even if you, even if YouTube sort of half heartedly tries to whack you the mole, some money is coming out of their whack hammer at the same time. They're doing at the same time. Like it just doesn't make it like, of course it's, of course the perverse, it's like stacked perverse incentive show title. But yeah, I don't see that existing any longer.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I mean even to do like a little behind the scenes stuff for listeners as we stay on top of like what are best practices for podcast editing and for video podcasts, which we're going to be moving more into. I have been reading that there's a shift away from like really glossy, highly produced because consumers are increasingly skeptical that those things are AI. And there's incentive now to like leave your filler words in podcasts. Let people hear us breathe. Let them hear us say like that's evidence of a real person and that there's thinking happening.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No one would generate this hairline. Like that's not something someone would do.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, we're real here folks. But it's, I mean it's wild to think about that that like the editing tools have gotten so good that you can, you can create a human produced thing that is so clean and sharp that now people think it's fake. So there's incentive to like let it be a little bit messy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And that was one of the initial appeals of TikTok and maybe still is one that was raw. Right. And even sort of the zoom era that came with COVID I think people understood that maybe audience that had a higher tolerance for less produced.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. Than people understood. And now it's becoming a signal of. Of real. Which I think is a very interesting fascinating though at the same time I do sidebar. I'm so glad you brought up the podcast. That is an AI summary that's 40 minutes long. That's like a guide to. That's just a summary of whatever book I am finding too. This is happening when I'm just searching for an ebook of something like, you know, I'm doing the zero to well read reading. And I think I've said on that show I've been using Apple books because I like their highlighting feature where I can highlight as I'm reading and I can export the whole thing into one document in one go. Don't me I'm sure your workflow is better and I'm so proud of you listener for that. This works for me. But in searching even for I can't remember the last one that's been publicly available but any of them now there's like four study guides and some of them are audio and there's like an audio study guide that's 24 dol and clearly it's just there to get someone who doesn't really know or isn't really paying attention to buy the book and then probably they could get a refund if they wanted to, but then they're gonna do it and they're gonna follow through. And, like, you only need a hundred of those people to fall for it to make a couple thousand dollars before you get banned. Like, it's just. It's just not sustainable. We're gonna need different kinds of bulwarks against the agentic hordes that we're all gonna be dealing with into the foreseeable future at the same time. Speaking of audiobooks and Spotify. It's working, Rebecca.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's working.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think this is one we don't get a lot of calls Right on what's going to happen. I think you and I were pretty bullish on Spotify getting into audiobooks. So do we take our victory lap now or do you want to, like, stretch it out a little bit more? You want to double down? Where do you want to go with that?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Like, link arms and do half a lap?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, okay. I think we can.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think we can feel. Or we can relay it. I think we can feel good about how we called it. But also thank you, Spotify, for actually sharing some data. It's so rare that we get it. Spotify had their annual investor day last week, and this was one of the big things that they talked about. Audiobook listening is up 60% year over year on the platform. A million people have paid for the Audiobooks plus membership, which is how you get additional access to additional books or additional listening time above those 15 hours a month that are built in for premium listeners. And those million People account for $100 million in annualized revenue for Spotify. Also, more than half of the folks listening to audiobooks on Spotify have just started doing it in the last year. And they're just. They're seeing their page match feature, which is the thing that lets you move back and forth between print and audio or ebook. And audio is resulting in people finishing books, like, 55% faster, which makes. Makes tons of sense. But they have not just shuffled the deck chairs around of audiobook listeners. They haven't just converted some of Audible's customers to being people who listen to audiobooks on Spotify. Instead, they are unlocking new audiobook listeners. People who have never engaged with an audiobook before are doing it now that they're available on Spotify and that they have grown the pie instead of just gotten a bigger slice of it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep. Not a surprise. And it. It suggests to me that the war for your ears that we, you know, we're kind of starting to watch several years ago When Spotify first announced audiobooks on their platform under the regime they were doing, it is that pretty much headphone friendly content is competing for the same time. It just is like Netflix and Peacock are competing for the same time. And you can see Netflix has, over time diversified the kinds. It's not just all it used to be. Just for people who aren't, you know, 45 years old, believe it or not, you could get DVDs in the mail. This is a wild thing to say. And that was their core product. But then they realized that they had a logistics problem where it'd be easier if they didn't have to do the mail stuff, right? And then like, okay, what else can we show people? Now they've got basically, they've got tv, they've got game shows, they've got talk shows, they've got scripted, they've got movies. They're filling all of the niches of what people want to do when they're sitting on the couch or just watching a screen.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or a white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

[Canva Advertiser]

From taco night in Tulum to sushi in Tokyo, every bite is rewarding and Pulse worthy with MX Gold's 4 times membership rewards points at restaurants worldwide. Wherever you dine, points are piling up. So bring your friends along for your next course because it's not all about the posts, it's about the company and the memories. How can Gold from Amex sweeten your next food moment? Learn [e-mail] Explore Gold terms and pointscap

[Leo Laporte]

apply every Tuesday we talk security and privacy on Security Now. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me and Steve Gibson this week as we talk about Microsoft's changes in their Edge browser. Not going to leave passwords in plain text anymore. An apparently serious zero point quantum vacuum energy source. Can that be real? And then AI models designed to improve security. Not just for anthropic, but OpenAI and Microsoft too. All of that this week on Security now. You'll find it at Twitter, tv, SN

[Jeff O'Neill]

or wherever you get your podcasts and all. All the way to video podcasts, right? Coming back to now, they're competing with YouTube and some of these other places

[Rebecca Schinsky]

and they've got a deal with Netflix where a lot of the Spotify produced podcasts are going on. Netflix. You can Watch your As much as I hate that the dominant verb for engaging with podcasts now is watch. You can watch them on Netflix.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And the thing I'm now waiting for, and I've been waiting for for some time and I think you have too is Audible. Amazon Music. That's just one thing. It's just called Audible and you get all of your stuff in that. Like I don't know. They, they, they've been, they've tried to buy pods and have things over there but Spotify the ringer has been an especially valuable property. There haven't been a lot like they had wondry and some other things but I think they maybe have some competing incentives on Amazon's. Like the PNLs don't line up where they, they've got some fiefdoms and Spotify didn't. Right. Like they were acquiring thing. They were going all into the same service where if you wanted to integrate Amazon music and Audible and I don't know what Shingle has more. I don't know Q rating, I don't know what people care about more. I would guess Audible, Amazon Music doesn't feel like a thing. But you put them in one shingle and then you get behind that and you really go to war with Spotify. I think Amazon has to do that. I know they're selling cloud AI, maybe it's small potatoes for them now, but right now I think that like Spotify is clearly catching up and feature compliant user experience. I use them both in different situations if I can. I prefer to be in Spotify. That's just where I prefer to be at this point.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I do all of my, well as all of my podcast listening, all of my music listening and as much audiobook listening as I can on Spotify. And then I'm sort of supplementing with Libro or like we're lucky to have access to the Penguin Random House audio or you know, early editions of things. I think I, I think Audible is going to regret if they don't already being slow to make changes to that to the platform because like they started panicking as soon as Spotify announced this. There was a like an Audible report call maybe in the first quarter after Spotify launched audiobooks. And it was you if you read between the lines. I remember talking about it on the show. It was pretty clear that Spotify was already making a dent in Audible's business and they've continued to produce like Audible exclusive podcasts and Audible exclusive audiobooks. And I'm really curious if that if the ROI is there, like, are you really converting customers for those exclusive things? Spotify seems to have moved away from the. Like, we're going to be the exclusive host of these particular shows because some big shows had moved and done. I think Armchair Expert had had a year or two where they were exclusively on Spotify and like the old ones were still available elsewhere and it turned out to not be worth it for them. Like, listeners are not moving platforms just for access to one show. And Audible, I think, is continuing to carry that strategy forward. I would love to be a fly on the wall in an Audible content strategy meeting.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Me too. So we get this kind of story from time to time in which a book that's been out for a while gets quote unquote modernized and sometimes it is for language. Raald Dahl. This is the, maybe the most famous one where some of the less savior references to certain kinds of people were. Were sanded down, replaced, I don't think. And we talked about it when we did the. The zero to well read for Judy Blooms Forever in which the available, you know, basically women's products or, you know, period, period management products were updated to things that you could actually buy and use because that is such an important text for a lot of people in period for that first time. And I understand those. I think those make sense. This is the one that's on the other side of the line for me of like, again, people can do what they want. I'm not really interested in like policing this, but in terms of what I want books to do and especially this book. So this is a reprint of Sara Shepard's Young Adult Pretty Little Liars, which got turned into shows and all the things huge. It was written in 2006 and what they did here. And I don't know who caught this. I don't. This online thing, it feels like the kind of thing the online hordes would have ticked up is replace a marker of time. Right? And essentially what they did was make references not to Fear Factor but to more modern shows and then Instagram and Tick Tock rather than I don't know what they live Journal or whatever it was at the time. I don't know. It does. The specifics don't really matter here you can read the article written by Angelina Maza in the New York Times so that modern, I guess young adult readers or any kind of readers don't bump up against like that being out of. Out of touch. I guess I'll throw it to you after I just say it's like I don't like this one. This feels to me meaningfully different than the sanitary napkins in Forever by Judy Blume, which is like, instructional. And then Anthony Horowitz has some stuff like, I'll go, I guess this happens a lot. I'll go switch out snooker tables for PlayStations. My sense of this is let the books be the books. And it fundamentally changes our understanding of the writing and the life of that book because that's not the world these books were written into. And so it changes the whole thing. You gotta bump up against it. Maybe it's, this is the old crusty old man in me, or I've been reading Sophocles and I'm not asking you to like, update all the language and, you know, make it make everything seem more palatable. But at some level, the books were written when they're going to book read. Their books were written when they were written. And if you want to read a more contemporary book, read a more contemporary book. That's where I am. That's just where I am on this.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think that's where I am too. Like, it's interesting to me that this is a sort of mid and upper level YA title where like teen readers are clued into this, but also where there are folks kind of in our age group that were big readers of Pretty Little Liars. Like, there's mid and late millennials that were into that who are now not happy to see, like, why are we changing this to TikTok? There's a mention in this piece that, like, Scholastic makes an effort to keep the Babysitters Club books time agnostic and that the way that that manifests is things like, like, they're not gonna put iPhones into 1986. They say here, but they will change out a refere. Instead of putting a tape into the vcr, the characters just watch a movie. Instead of saying, you know, hand her your tape before you go on stage and she'll put it in the tape deck. They have a character say, if you need music for your number, just tell her your song before you go on stage and she'll play it. Like, I object to that less partially because these are younger readers that we, we want. I want the experience for younger readers to be as frictionless as possible so that they enjoy reading and like, they're not bumping on too much. I don't see a substantive difference between put the, put the tape into the VCR or just watch the movie like that. That's fine. But there's something about anchoring to the specific technology that they've done in Pretty Little Liars, where, like, they're referring to TikTok, that pull that pulls me out of it. I don't. I don't know. I can't fully articulate what I don't love about this. But there's a couple different vectors of, like, make it a little smoother. Also, once you make the transition from VCR to just watches a movie, you probably never have to touch that again because the ways that we watch movies will continue to change. But you can just have the characters say that, like, less anchoring to that no longer. I mean, the obsolete technology is helpful, but I don't really care.

[Jeff O'Neill]

From a slightly different angle, maybe at the same time. And maybe you can tell me if this resonates with you at all. Reading books like this that are from different times and have people doing things they do, they don't do now, especially in our modern world, which is so obsessed with the immediate moment and has no sense of history, is really your best way of encountering how people once lived. That those are real people and experiences and they were different. And if you have to look something up, tough noogies, as we used to say in the 80s, go have some experience of, like, people having a different life than you. And like, we know. And you and I have read these books like Little Women or the Great Gatsby, and there's something to be said. I think it's a feature, not a bug, that they are of their time because you get to time travel a little bit, you have some sense of the long arc of history and things do change. And this is what we. This is all. This is all that we have of encountering other historical moments, essentially. And if you change it, what are we going to have? Like, just documentaries and textbooks, like, leave it be, man.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's a great point. That's a great point. And like, it hasn't hurt Little Women at all. No readers for more than 100 years. That there are references to games and cultural touchstones that, that we don't understand that you do have to go Google. I do think the Judy Blume example is important. Like, I read. Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret, in the original old version. But it was right. It was like, right as period products were changing and they. They had not updated the text yet. And I remember being so confused. Understood all the period stuff. But what are we talking about with belts? What. What's going on? That was not part of any of the period conversations that I had had when people had given me the talk updating for things like that or like I think they've updated parts of Forever. The intro to Forever is updated to say like you know today if this happened she would, she wouldn't just go to Planned Parenthood, but she'd be. They would be asking her about testing for STIs. It wouldn't just be about birth control like to update to provide important information. And the kinds of books that young people people go to for life guidance is. Makes a lot of sense to me. But like I, I cannot get super motivated to say like I would never say yes we should update all of these things just based on technology.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I kind of wish we would just let things stand like kids can handle it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, they can. And you know I do think it maybe some people might think it's hypocritical to say the forever one and we're okay with I don't really care about that. You can call me hypocritical. But I do think some of the things that a book like that has actually de facto become sex ed in so many places where there isn't sex ed available and women's health and reproductive rights are under assault constantly. That is different than anti Horowitz like switching out PlayStation for snooker. Here's my hot take about this. If the difference between someone getting through your book and not is that your book isn't good enough. That's right. If it needs to do that for people not to continue reading they shouldn't be spending time reading your book because there's plenty of books out there that are age that have aged and have you know, historical references that are difficult now. But maybe this is me shaking my old hand at Cloud. But I, I think we the longer

[Rebecca Schinsky]

that we talk about this the more I really come around to like let's just not do this at all except for things like the period products or where like where it really makes a substantive difference because there is some value especially for generations that that are under socialized and spending a lot of time on screens to reading stories about kids who didn't have that option. Like even when we did Perks of being a wallflower for zero to well read. That's early 2000s. Social media doesn't exist. Your parents aren't tracking you on your cell phone. Like Charlie leaves School at 3pm and sometimes doesn't come home until 10pm and no one of the like he's living the glorious life we lived. And the late 90s where your parents just didn't know where you were all the time. Yeah, we were out there having to figure it out for ourselves and somehow everybody was okay. And I think it's important for younger people to know like that that's possible. You know, like the technology can be a real tool. There are some safety applications certainly, but like to just go hang with your friends in an unstructured way, that's. That was the only option that we had. And it turns out that's really good for you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. And I think, I mean the watch a movie versus put a VCR in, like at its core it's not different, but I actually think it's core is. Actually is quite different because it does suggest to you things like modern watching a movie is a lot different than watching a movie when we were kids. Like, what movies were available to you? It was more expensive on a per watch basis to like go find something. So many of us had movies we watched over and over again, not because we love them necessarily, but because we had them on tape or we were watching it on tbs. Right. That's a different, like, that's a different kind of media world. And maybe it's slight, but I think that is a difference, a distinction that's also a difference that matters. And you know, something Chuck Klosterman said about his motivation to write the 90s books is he wanted. He felt like. He wanted to capture what it felt like to live in the 90s and not just have like history say here's what happened, but here's what it felt like. I think that's rarer now than the facts because we're going to have so many documents and images like swimming in primary quote unquote sources of that kind. What we're not going to have is the books and the art and the 400 pages of what it was like to be 16 in 1981. And I think that matters. I do think that matters. So if they want to write a new ver. If they want to write a new Babies Club. Ver do a new Babies Club said today. But I think there's something to be said for keeping the ones as they are. Anyway, I guess I didn't know I had more in the chamber about that than I thought. So much for a slow week. All right, it's time for frontless foyer brought to you by thriftbooks.com I guarantee you can find some unaltered babysitter's club and then you throw Horowitz book. Maybe it's a situation where like, you can get the Unboulderized versions of these, and they become valuable over time. 19 million books and counting. Also, movies you can put in a dvd. I don't think you can get a VCR tape, probably on Thriftbooks right now, though I wouldn't be surprised if you could. They got all kinds of stuff.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Stuff.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Free shipping in order to $15. And of course, each purchase gets you closer to a reading reward. Redemption. Rebecca, I didn't know you were reading this. I'm so excited to hear about your pick. What. Tell us about what you've been reading.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Well, I have not finished it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, okay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

But I mean, it's been a. We've. We have had so many recordings for podcasts. We've been doing so much homework. But this morning I started Whistler by Ann Patchett. And then I regretted all my choices because I had to. To stop reading at 100 pages. Come do work.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So you were excited. You're pumped. It was great.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, it's Aunt Patchett. It's great so far. And like Ann Patchett, she's gonna stick the landing. But this opens with a woman who's in her mid-50s. She and her husband are in the Met in New York. They're walking around and they notice this older gentleman following them. And it turns out that he, the older gentleman, was the main character, woman stepdad for a brief period when she was a kid. And we start to unwind that connection that they were in a car accident together. That was a really formative and critical experience. But he was a really positive figure in her life. The car accident happens at the same time that her sister has had a major surgery when they're kids. And so all those events from their young life are tied up. So you kind of get a little gang getting back together, but mostly through the lens of this woman reflecting on a time in her childhood that she's never really unpacked. And much to my delight, her sister has grown up to be a therapist. So they also have conversations where it's like sister is dipping into therapist mode. But it just, like, I feel like I'm in good hands. From page one with Ann Patchett.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You are.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

You know that you are. And I kind of. I kind of like, I knew what I was doing to myself this morning. You know, like, I got an hour or so to finish my coffee. And then like, also, no one's going to come looking for me if I don't sign on to work until 9:30. And it was just like, let me just enjoy this. I'm delighted that we don't have a bonus episode to record this afternoon. So I can go back to Ann Patchett.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's very nice to be able to do. You know, reminds me, I recommended a movie to you this year, A Little Prayer of starring David Straight Heron, which also indicates a similar dynamic of like, you know, your in laws, essentially your step parents or whatever else it might be. And there are important relationships that are forced to forged there. I think it's relatively undermined as a artistic idea because I think we have a pretty good sense now of like boundaries and stuff around family and found families even easier. But these people that. And then. And then sort of the primary relationship that you have goes away. But then the satellites around that, the moons around that planet that you no longer orbiting, they're still important to you. What do you do with that? I think is very, very.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, he was a really important figure in this character's life for that time that he was married to her mom. And then the marriage ends and the kids just don't have access to this person anymore. He's their stepdad, so he's just kind of out of the picture. They haven't seen each other in decades. She hasn't thought about him in decades. But all of it, you know, comes back to the surface and I just. I like the idea and I love me some Ann Patchett. June 2nd, it's. It's out on Tuesday. If you're listening to this, that you can trot down to the bookstore tomorrow and get it. Like, June 2nd is the perfect day to release an Ann Patchett book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yes.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Good job. HarperCollins. Y' all know what you're doing over there?

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's great. Where does the horse come in? Have you gotten to the horse yet? I've been sort of idly joking about horse forwardness of this book because the COVID is just an oil painting of a horse.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I'm not there yet.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know no horses at all.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's the Whistler of the. I just haven't gotten to the horses.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But you're 100 pages in. That's not your fault. I write the book.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Maybe the Whistler is going to be like the Whistler, the artist. It could be a horse. I don't know. We'll. We'll find out.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Because it was at art museum. They said they found each other, right?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay, my pick again. I did audio this. We did a frontless way a couple days ago. I had something there. But this one I just finished. Big fan by Mike Sure. And Joe Posnowski. Mike sure. If you don't know, you probably do know. Mike Sure's work starting with Saturday Night Live, Parks and Rec.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The Good Place.

[Jeff O'Neill]

He's been part of Brooklyn nine. Nine. He was part of shrinking. He's a part of all this kinds of stuff that goes into this. A sports fan and a really cool guy. I would say. I like Mike. I think I like Mike Shore himself. In addition to his.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I think he would be a good hang.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think he'd be a good hang. He also wrote a book you and I both really liked called how to Be Perfect.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Is that. Was that the title? That was his own forays into philosophy, especially coming out of doing the research. The Good Place, which I thought was tremendous and a wonderful audiobook.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

He co hosts a sports podcast with Joe Posnanski called the Pause Casts, which is hard to say. Yes. Joe Polnowski is a sports writer. I actually read Posniewski a long time ago when he was a Kansas City sports reporter and when I was around there. So I followed both of the careers. Interesting. And apparently they are good friends. Into some shared sports fandom. And they got a book deal to write about fandom. And it's called Big Fan and it's out. I believe it's out now. It was. This is an early audio copy. I believe it's out now. You can go check for Big Fan. They're out there. And is it a perfect book? No. Did I enjoy it and rip through it? Yes. I think it didn't ultimately deliver on the premise I thought which was going to be each chapter was them exploring a sports fandom. Right. They kind of did what they wanted to do around sports, which I'm not mad about necessarily. But hearing them talk and have back and forth and it's about their friendship as well and with their friends and the sports and like the kinds of opportunities they get as a sports writer and as a major celebrity or he's not a major celebrity, but he has access to the halls of power. So he gets a good sport ticket. He gets a good advantage. Fans. But they talk. You know, it's. It's just fun. I think it'd be a wonderful Father's Day gift if you have a sports fan in your life. It's humane and wide ranging. I also think, and this is just me who am a bit of a loner more than maybe I should be. I find it fascinating the way that some people pick up friends and they pick up friends as strangers like Them, even themselves. I found that part pretty interesting. And I think they're doing a lot of bonding over sports. And of course that's one thing people do. And they get it. They talk to a, I think a sociologist technically about, you know, what are the factors that go into fandoms, why this matters. This is not going to be a thinky kind of book about what makes fandom like this. It's not that kind of a thing. It's like it's taken as read that being a sports fan is if not. If not good. I think it is good in this book, but at least not bad. I think there's some behaviors that I'd be like, I'm not so sure this is good for all of our identities and mental health, but it's worth the price of admission alone for when they go to the dart World Championships over in the uk, like, there's a couple of set pieces that are worth it on their, on their own that you, if you, you know, I actually didn't finish a couple of the chapters because I wasn't that interested. But you just go to the next one and that's fine. The funniest part of the audiobook is Tom Hanks wrote an introduction, but for whatever reason, he doesn't narrate it. And Nick Offerman narrates Tom Hanks letter to them, but with commentary from Nick Offerman about why Tom Hanks isn't narrating it, which is maybe too cute by half, but not for me. I have a high saccharine content for that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That's great. That's great.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So it's a fun audio experience especially.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I've had that sort of on my radar because I, I saw, you know, a Mike Shore book and I was gonna be excited about it. I wish it were more about fandoms more broadly. Like I, I'm not.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They do some of that. They do some of that. They do some of that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I'm not super interested in the sports fandom, but like, if they wanted to follow around, I don't know, like die hard fans of some other thing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It would be one of those. The subcultures are fascinating and I think that that could have been really.

[Jeff O'Neill]

They do a. They do a torture swap where they each give the other person assignment to do something they don't think they're going to like. And Shure makes Posnanski learn how to play pickleball and compete in a pickleball tournament. And Posnanski makes Mike Schur go to the Sphere in Las Vegas to see a Grateful Dead concert followed by a Wrestlemania event.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Wow.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Which is fun. Those are. Those are some of the highlights as well. Again, I'd say 60 of this is amazing. And 40 of this sort of B tier filler. But you know what? I'm not mad. Yeah, I'm not mad about that at all.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Can we embed Mike Shore with, like, the people who have been following fish around for 20 years? Or, like, I sat next to a woman at a concert a couple years ago who was telling me that she had been to, like, 75 my morning jacket concerts. And I was like, tell me everything about that. Like, you start to see the same people everywhere. Like, I wanna. That would be fascinating. But Mike sure doesn't need my notes.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Sure slips into one of the footnotes. One of the great, maybe the greatest literary humble brag I've ever heard. And it goes something like this. He's a collector of various things. Baseball cards when he was a kid, and then later when his son becomes a sports fan. But in the intermediate years, he became a collector of books, especially first editions of the books by authors he cares about. And at one point he said something to the effect of. I got to the point where every book by all my favorite authors in first edition. So I stopped.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Damn.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I was like, okay. All right. That is.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Turns out having money is nice.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It turns out that having money is nice. Nice. It really does. So I was like, wow. I don't know. And then it got me thinking. I wonder what budget I would need to have a first edition of all the authors I like. Because I. I don't know that he's reading, like, Dickens or something. I don't know that. Or even. Or Darwin or like. Or the First Folio. Like, is it. He name checks Colson Whitehead and Pulse of Percival ever, and I think he nem checks someone else. Which also made me madder because if you're gonna have that much money, you should have worse taste than that.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah. How dare he have such good taste?

[Jeff O'Neill]

How dare we have Do Me Better Than me and with more money? That is upsetting to me on multiple levels. But I was like, what are we talking about? Like, what. What dollar amount are we talking? If I walked into Mike Schur's library, is it like a Dan Brown situation where he has all this, like, stuff, Right? I don't know. But maybe that is worth an interview or an excuse to.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That would be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Talk to him.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That would be fun. I was in some little bookstore in. In Utah a couple years ago, and they had a first edition of Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Ah.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

That I did ask about. It was like three, five hundred dollars. And I did not do it. But I was like, if it had been Gilead, I would have.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Is that, that's. That would be below your meridian for buying a first edition of Gilead?

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Yeah, I think so. Like a first edition of Gilead, A first edition of Beloved. Like there are a couple that I think. Think I would be unwisely willing to splash out for. Like, I'd regret it. I might, you know, I wouldn't regret it. I'd pay for it later. In other ways, it's weird.

[Jeff O'Neill]

My, I. I had a book collecting gene for a while. And he talks about, like, sometimes your gene, your collecting gene goes dormant. Depend on time of life. I will pony up for like a new sign first edition if I'm at Pals. Like, I might buy it there where I would have gotten it somewhere else or maybe just on ebay.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Book.

[Jeff O'Neill]

But I'm finding less and less interested because I'll walk by like the music rare. I just don't find it. I'm sure there's a price that'd be low enough, but I don't think it's a price I could get some of those books for. So I don't know what that's about.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

The list for me is probably like 10 books long. Like, I just. I'm not that attached to books as objects in general. There's just those books that really mean a lot to me. And I kind of like, I like the idea of it, but also I'm not out there collecting them that like, I did not pony up for housekeeping. And I only think I would have. Forget the ad. Like, it's all hypothetical.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I. I will say I have bought like first, not first edition, but like second printings or sometimes first editions of books that aren't worth that much. And then put that library, like plastic thing on them and then put them on the shelves. I gotta say, that goes a long way to making them feel special, even if they're not assigned first edition.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Oh, good.

[Jeff O'Neill]

There's a. There's a little bit of like, you know, when you put the egg wash on the croissant, it seems faster than it actually is. This is sort of putting the egg wash on your book. Like, oh, look at that. It's like, yeah, that's a fourth printing and it has an Oprah Book Club sticker on it. Like, which is fine, but it's not as, I don't know, opening up the Holy Grail and having Indiana Jones peer into it.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

Listen, as long as you're not putting those, like, vinyl cushion covers on your couches, we're okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's right. Well, thanks so much to listening, everybody. Thanks to Thriftbooks for sponsoring Frontless Foyer. You can find show notes, including the links to everything we've talked to, talked about on this episode of book riot.com listen, go find the patreon patreon.com book riot podcast. Find zero to, well, read anywhere you get your podcast. Shoot us an email podcastookriot.com for your feedback. I've got a little bit of backlog of listener emails and maybe one of these real slow January or do a mailbag, some kind of stuff. So if you've got a question or comment or a reading experience for us that you maybe think would be good for a mailbag, please, you're especially interested and welcome to.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

And if you happen to share a name with a famous author, please tell us in your email that you're not that famous author, because I sent a ridiculous email yesterday to the wrong Mary Roach.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Shouts To Mary Roach, listener. Thank you so much for writing us and for listening. Shouts To Mary Roach, author as well. And shouts, Rebecca, for example, putting yourself out there.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

I thought I was getting to, like, gently throw you under the bus because the email came in in, like, March, and we had just been like, is it really Mary Roach? What should we do? How should we respond?

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I had to be like, mary,

[Rebecca Schinsky]

thanks so much for writing us. Jeff got a case of the Midwesterns, and we just, you know, didn't get back to you. Got a little starstruck. Hey, here are my thoughts. And then wrong Mary Roach. So you, it turns out you were

[Jeff O'Neill]

right, which, yeah, I baited you into doing the work and taking the awkward egg on the face. Turned out great for me.

[Rebecca Schinsky]

It's a good day for you. Happy birthday.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, thank you very much. All right, we'll talk to everyone later.

[Leo Laporte]

Every Sunday, we talk about the week's tech news on this Week in Tech. Hi, this is Leo Laporte inviting you to join me. Harper Reed, AI guru. Amy Webb, futurist. We talk about the week's tech News. All those CEOs going with the president to China. What did they accomplish? Jensen Huang hitching a ride in Alaska and why backpacks suddenly got so terrible. Tune in TWiT every Sunday. You'll find it at TWiT TV or wherever you get your podcasts.