So I don't have a very large TBR, and not a lot of physical books in general. I own exactly 100 books, which makes calculating a percentage easy. I currently have 19 books on my TBR, 4 of which I've started. I always see book content creators have these huge TBR's of 200-400 books and it kind of makes me wonder "Is that normal?" Because I don't know anyone in my personal life who has so many unread books. And of course these people have a channel dedicated to books and often make money off of reading. So it might be a bit of an unrealistic comparison.

So I want to know: If you aren't a content creator and reading isn't a source of money in some other way for you either, how large is your TBR? Why is it not smaller or bigger? Do you think having such a large TBR (>200 books) is wasteful?

So I don't have a very large TBR, and not a lot of physical books in general. I own exactly 100 books, which makes calculating a percentage easy. I currently have 19 books on my TBR, 4 of which I've started. I always see book content creators have these huge TBR's of 200-400 books and it kind of makes me wonder "Is that normal?" Because I don't know anyone in my personal life who has so many unread books. And of course these people have a channel dedicated to books and often make money off of reading. So it might be a bit of an unrealistic comparison.

So I want to know: If you aren't a content creator and reading isn't a source of money in some other way for you either, how large is your TBR? Why is it not smaller or bigger? Do you think having such a large TBR (>200 books) is wasteful?

I saw an interesting post regarding Claude's announcement that it will be watermarking its text output in a way that travels with cut and paste of the text. Although they don't say how they do it, some people who have expertise in this area (which I do not have) discussed approaches to this. Looks like it may boil down to the output being slightly steered in a certain direction such that someone with the key to detecting the watermarking will be able to detect it but you wouldn't notice it just by reading the text. For example, when an LLM with hundreds of billions of parameters is confronted with numerous equally valid word choices, the choice is currently random but under the watermarking process it would be steered. Apparently, you don't need to steer it enough to make it obvious to a human reader for someone with the key to the watermarking to find it electronically.

This might be helpful in stemming some of the AI witch hunts of authors, I don't know. I wonder whether it'll work well on short text, because the way it was described made it sound like longer text would be watermarked more effectively. Also, it seems to me that if Claude and others can program their product to watermark text in this way, someone else could develop a program to look for evidence of this kind of watermarking and remove it. I don't know how easy or hard that would be to do.

Writers who use LLMs for editing might have to worry about the watermark being injected into text they initially wrote themselves but ran through the AI for an edit, if the LLM is making changes to wording based in part on the steering mechanism above.

Of course, if someone generates AI text and edits it heavily enough, it would destroy this watermarking process. I've seen a couple of people say that it would have to be rewritten enough to essentially become that person's writing rather than the AI's, but I don't know if that's the case.

Finally, from talks I've given to writer's groups I get the impression it is becoming more and more popular to use AI for things like plotting, outlining, brainstorming, and the like, and this watermarking won't be present in the end product if those are the only uses rather than actually writing the text itself.

I find the topic and the evolution of the technology an interesting one to think and talk about.

I was reading an article this morning about immortality and whether or not it’s a good thing. The author used an example of a stamp collector to illustrate one of his points: a stamp collector knows they will not collect every stamp ever, but mortality makes the journey more interesting and fun. If the stamp collector were to live forever, acquiring every stamp would be easy, and the journey meaningless.

Of course, I had to think about how reading would work with immortality! I’m actually unsure if you could read every book that’s ever been published since the printing press, especially when new ones come out every week, even with immortality. Like on the surface it sounds like you totally could because what else are you going to do with infinite time, but there have been soooo many books since the printing press, plus indie books, both physically and digitally published, and there’s always an anticipated novel.

Not to mention, with the way we’re treating our planet, you may be immortal, but humanity as a whole isn’t, and books will probably be gone after the apocalypse, so time is limited either way.

Well, barring any existential threat to humanity itself, would you choose to become immortal so you could read every accessible published book? Or would you decline? Or maybe something in the middle: become immortal as long as it takes to read every accessible published book (not including books that will be published after today, or else you truly might be immortal)? For clarity: you’d only have to read one edition of The Lord of the Rings, not literally every edition published, and you’d need to make a good faith effort (reading every day and no DNFs until after 50 pages).

I think I would decline. I would have to become a nomad and spend my days traveling and reading, which sounds nice on the surface; the first decade or so might be amazing, but eventually every day would become the same.

Guys, it is I, A Reader That Was Promised! George is 100% waiting for ME to catch up with the books before he can release The Winds of Winter. I’ll try not to take too long, y’all hold on🫡💙