Nimble Books LLC

09/04/2024

05/01/2024

A correction for the record, prompted by some unwelcome news about a Nimble Books author.

I published the feminist novel THE GRANDDAUGHTER PROJECT by Shaheen Chishti and on quite a few occasions went out of my way to boost him and his stated life projects of empowering women and encouraging peace between Jews and Muslims. He “went dark” last October and I was told he had a stroke. Un...

03/20/2024

03/07/2024

Love these.

03/01/2024

Rest in peace to the author who led an amazing life. At 83, she crafted an innovative content mashup.

One of the sadder aspects of being a publisher is that as time goes by, I discover, often belatedly, that some of my authors have passed on. Mayme Lee Stevens Bruce, known and bylined as “Stevey”, passed away in 2022 at the age of 98. She had quite a life.

02/23/2024

AI provides data-based book market analysis.

https://buff.ly/3T5hooN

Humans and models making book-reading richer, more diverse, and more surprising.

02/22/2024

+1 for using Conan dataset

Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narr...

01/26/2024

tldr: I’m not sure of the details because no one has ever done this before. But here is what I have in mind.

A relentless focus on quality. The only way AI for book publishing will ever be valuable to anyone is if it produces extremely high quality work. Hackwork is a waste of everyone’s time.

Collaborative development of prompts & editing tools.

High use of automation, part-time effort on our part.

Massively parallel production and evaluation of drafts.

Use of APIs to call other resources.

Book or books to be published by Nimble this fall.

Reproducible, scalable method for producing those books.

Agentic interface to the books using Custom GPTs.

If this gives you ideas or gets you excited wondering if something you are doing can fit into it, write me!

12/19/2023

A quick year-end announcement. I am just beginning the annual process of clearing out my list of "to dos that I owe you". Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons it has gotten a bit lengthy, so if you think I should have gotten back to you about something, 1) rest assured I feel guilty about it ;-) 2) I am trying to get to it 3) if you write me directly I will immediately either a) if it is small, get it done or b) let you know I am alive and try to get it done as soon as possible. Fred

11/15/2023

Today in Replace the News: our local bubble.

A conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges

11/14/2023

The AI Lab for Book-Lovers now has an updated knowledge base with a focus on my Annotated Bibliography on AI for Book-Lovers, 405 items including journal articles, news, and software. I'm proud of this resource which is both deep and broad. The GPT will prioritize the articles that I have annotated. Here's an example:

https://buff.ly/3SEMfbR

11/06/2023

Sold the Korean rights to a backlist title last week, then upsold by adding an exclusive option for the Korean rights for the author's next book. https://buff.ly/49r30xt

11/04/2023

This handy annotated print edition of the Biden AI EO contains five types of abstracts--TLDR (one word); ELI5; TLDR vanilla; Scientific Style; and Action Items; five introductory essays, to increase the reader's exposure to viewpoint diversity, assessing the order with a focus on red-teaming, formal dissent, MAGA, DEI, and book publishing; a collection of notable passages extracted by AI, one per page; and the full text of the order. These annotations are "consumer grade" and just scratch the surface of what is possible with more intensive professional analytics in the future.

Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence [Annotated]

10/31/2023

The US government has invested billions in understanding subterranean warfare. Timely reading from the AI Lab for Book-Lovers:

Bedrock Prime: How Can the United States Best Address the Need to Achieve Dominance within the Subterranean Domain?

07/25/2023

https://www.the-yuan.com/646/Book-publisher-Fred-Zimmerman-on-the-ethics-of-creating-AI-aided-books.html

As the difficulty of distinguishing books penned by humans from those written by AI rises, ethical questions swarm in tandem with the growing numbers of such works. Technology and publishing expert Fred Zimmerman has answers in this hard-hitting exclusive interview with The Yuan.

07/21/2023

It's happening already

07/12/2023

How (and why) I built a publishing workflow module in a weekend