Monday, September 1, 2025
DP25015 A future (Jan 2026) AI Book V01 020925
DP25014 Infographic - American Books Published Spring 1918 V01 010925
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
DP25013 AI Copyright - Perplexity AI. V01 270825
FT owner sues Perplexity AI for copyright infringement
The owner of the Financial Times has accused Perplexity AI, a US technology company, of “free-riding” on journalists’ articles in a practice that risks “ultimately threatening the core of democracy”.
Nikkei, the Japanese company that owns the FT, has filed a lawsuit alongside The Asahi Shimbun, a daily Japanese title, accusing Perplexity of copyright infringement.
The two media companies allege that Perplexity used their articles without permission and has repeatedly displayed content from these articles on users’ devices since at least June 2024. They claim that unauthorised content used by Perplexity includes articles behind Nikkei’s paywall.
In a joint statement, the companies said: “This course of Perplexity’s actions amounts to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation.
“If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy.”
The publishers are seeking an injunction to ensure Perplexity stops reproducing their content. They are also seeking damages of 2.2 billion yen (£11.1 million) each. Perplexity has been contacted for comment.
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine start-up based in San Francisco and founded in 2022. It has 30 million users and last month secured an $18 billion valuation in a funding round.
News organisations are becoming increasingly concerned about the use of AI driving widespread copyright infringement.
Publishers fear that AIgenerated content such as Google’s AI overviews will reduce valuable web traffic to their sites.
The BBC has threatened legal action against Perplexity, accusing the company of training its “default AI model” using BBC content. Perplexity called the BBC’s claims “manipulative and opportunistic”, adding that the broadcaster had “a fundamental misunderstanding of technology, the internet and intellectual property law”.
Dow Jones and the New York Post are also suing Perplexity over the alleged misuse of their articles to train its AI systems. The owner of Dow Jones and the New York Post is News Corporation, which also owns The Times and The Sunday Times.
Dow Jones and NYP Holdings said in their lawsuit, filed last year, that Perplexity’s AI “answer engine” copies their content without permission or compensation to generate responses to user prompts. They accused Perplexity of “engaging in a massive amount of illegal copying of publishers’ copyrighted works and diverting customers and critical revenues away from those copyright holders”.
This month, Perplexity failed to convince a New York federal court to dismiss or transfer the lawsuit.
Perplexity runs a default language model and provides subscribers with access to advanced models, including ChatGPT, designed for more complex tasks such as creative writing.
The AI start-up has a revenue-sharing programme to address concerns from publishers, which involves sharing advertising revenue from interactions when a publisher’s content is referenced.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that it was also launching a new programme for publishers.
Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive, said: “AI is helping to create a better internet, but publishers still need to get paid. So we think this is actually the right solution.”
Sunday, August 24, 2025
DP25012 Author - Architecture - Andrew Saint (Deceased) V01 250825
As one of the foremost architectural historians of his generation, Andrew Saint presented an unflinching view of the practitioners who touch all lives with all their noble intentions and human foibles. Unpicking the vaunted reputations of the great architects in books such as The Image of the Architect (1983), Saint channelled the vanity, pretentiousness and arrogance, as well as the brilliance, with the cautionary rider that “the powers, attributes and aims assumed by architects have often been at odds with reality”.
Edwin Lutyens was therefore “the foremost natural talent English architecture ever produced. His buildings were better conceived than Wren’s or Adam’s and better made than those of Frank Lloyd Wright (an admirer).
Against modernist barbarities, they say, Lutyens held up the banner of humanism.”
There was always a but. “Part of the trouble is that Lutyens resists intellectualisation.
His buildings were seldom about ideas that could be put into words. Lutyens was among the last architects who built for a set. The sentimentality and rootlessness of the Edwardian classes whom he served is mirrored in the brittle brilliance of the villas (seldom landed country houses) he created for them.”
Of James Stirling, who gave his name to the Riba annual prize for Britain’s best new building, he said: “Architects love him, while those who use his most notorious buildings loathe him. Today when engineers can twist structures to any shape an architect likes, it’s hard to recreate the impact made by the Leicester Engineering Building in 1962.
Hitherto most modern British architecture had been dour, colourless and rectangular. Here it went wild. It is a tumultuous, exuberant performance, sometimes comic, sometimes perverse.”
And yet, according to Saint, its utility was undermined by “a hard-driving, hard-drinking womaniser, a mixture of brutal and sensitive, kindly and selfish, greedy and funny. He had all the charm and confidence that architects must have to win jobs, but lacked any grain of social sensibility. His goal was to be a great architect, and sod almost everything else. In short he was a charismatic monster, as artists often are.”
Of the German-American founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, he said: “A period of eclipse often overtakes those whose ideas have become familiar to the point of cliché, but have yet to be detached from us by the processes of history. Gropius is certainly suffering from such a phase. In the air of bitterness and resentment still informing criticism of the Modern Movement, the most persistent theorist and organiser of its heyday has reaped his due share of derision.”
Tall and bespectacled with scholarly, bushy eyebrows, Saint looked not unlike the traditional Anglican clergyman that his father was. One might have been forgiven for thinking that he was about to deliver a sermon and he could give the impression of intellectual austerity on first encounter. Yet his young fogeyism was a front for a hinterland of fun and frivolity that would burst forth on better acquaintance. An invitation to collaborate with Saint would be a voyage of rigour around his beetling longhand and pinpoint-accurate notes.
His friend Gillian Darley, the architectural historian, said that being in Saint’s company “always involved an exchange of recent reading, a dash of gossip and exasperation at yet another misstep by a familiar institution or bureaucracy”.
Friends would be treated to tours of hidden London, particularly Victorian treasures south of the Thames such as at Brockwell Park or Streatham Common.
If there was a characterful old pub in the vicinity to end the excursion with a foaming pint of ale, so much the better.
He had a wide circle of friends, many of them with interests far removed from his own, and he was, one friend recalls, “always interested in what made people tick”.
He loved London, saying ‘its secrets are more various than other cities’
Andrew John Saint was born in Shrewsbury in 1946, one of two children to the Rev AJM Saint and Elisabeth (née Butterfield). His father was the vicar of St Philip and St James, Oxford, a grade I listed gothic revival masterpiece by George Edmund Street that helped to inspire Saint’s love of buildings.
After education at Christ’s Hospital in West Sussex, Saint remained unre- pentantly bookish at Balliol College, Oxford, while all about him were growing their hair. And rather than listen to blues or rock at student hops, he contented himself with playing the cello to a high standard in trios and quartets.
He remained unstirred by the radicalism of the University of Essex in three years as a young lecturer there from 1971. He was appointed architectural editor of the Survey of London for 12 years from 1974.
Aged 30, he cemented his reputation with a fine study of the Victorian architect Richard Norman Shaw, whose buildings included New Scotland Yard and the Piccadilly Hotel on Regent Street. John Betjeman was among the book’s admirers. In 1986 the Survey of London was shifted from the auspices of the Greater London Council — on its abolition by Margaret Thatcher — to English Heritage (now Historic England), where Saint remained for the next nine years.
Canonisation of sorts, in an academic milieu, was conferred on Saint in 1995 when he took up a professorship at Cambridge University to teach architectural history. He taught his doctoral students that if they must be orthodox in their appreciation of the modern movement, then not to be dogmatic and never to ape the architect’s cardinal sin of using pretentious, meaningless language. Prose should be clear and accessible: he never bought into the highhanded attitude that if you don’t understand you’re not clever enough. And if he never felt that he had quite found his spiritual home, he fought on the front line against attempts to close the department in the late Noughties as an act of academic vandalism based on flawed research. He did not wish for a fellowship and continued to live in London, in a terraced house on a crescent in Kennington. Built in 1913, it was an artisan’s cottage resplendent in red brick and gabled windows.
Despite being steeped in historicism as a doyen of the Victorian Society, and a general evangeliser of the merits of that’s century’s buildings, Saint wrote one of his best books — Not Buildings but a Method of Building — The Achievement of the Post-War Hertfordshire School Building Programme (1990)— on the architects at Hertfordshire county council in the Fifties and Sixties who revolutionised postwar school building and architecture in general with a humanist vision of modernism.
Saint wrote a compelling narrative of how Britain’s baby-booming population, a severe shortage of labour and materials after the Second World War and progressive educationists were the mother of invention in use of materials and flexible, modular system-based building concepts. Yet London, a place he dearly loved and understood instinctively, remained his specialism.
Returning to the Survey of London in 2006 to take up the position of general editor, Saint tried to remain true to the socially reforming roots of CR Ashbee, who had founded the Survey in 1894 to record the historic fabric of the capital.
He safeguarded the Survey’s future when it was under threat and oversaw its move from English Heritage to University College London and Yale.
Saint made it his mission to oversee works on the West End of London, which had been surprisingly neglected by the survey, such as two volumes on Marylebone (2017) after securing funding from the Howard de Walden Estate, which owns much of the high street. He added other volumes on Oxford Street (2020), Battersea and Woolwich, the first of which was written entirely by Saint and praised for its detail and elegance — it sold out.
He retired in 2019, but never from the pen. Two years later he published London 1870-1914: A City at its Zenith, which according to one reviewer was “enlivened with a rich line-up of colourful characters, including Baron Albert Grant; Henry Mayers Hyndman and his connections with Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw; John Burns; Octavia Hill; Aubrey Beardsley and the artistic bohemians”. He wrote to the end. His final book, Waterloo Bridge and London River: Investigations and Reflections, will be published posthumously later this year.
Saint is survived by his two daughters, Catherine and Lily, from his relationship to Ellen Leopold, a fellow author and “radical”, and a third daughter, Leonora, from another relationship.
After his separation from Leopold his long-term partner was Ida Jager, who also survives him.
He never tired of recording the rapidly changing city of London. He did not buy into the idea that the capital was properly planned, but that it was a series of villages. Within 10km of Trafalgar Square there is “something that binds the fabric of London together in a loose but definite way” — a feeling strengthened by the vernacular character of the London terrace. Saint said in 2021: “I’ve been living in London for 50 years now and I have no plans to leave, despite Brexit, Covid, the desertion of a few old friends to the countryside and a rash of absolutely dreadful new tall buildings. Its secrets are more various than other European cities.”
Architecture was endlessly compelling, he said, because it was one of the few disciplines that was both a science and an art in hopefully equal measure.
“If you treat it just as science, you will be ignored. If you treat it just as art, it may well pay you back.”
Andrew Saint, architectural historian, was born on November 30, 1946. He died after a long illness on July 16, 2025, aged 78
Saturday, August 23, 2025
DP25011 Podcast - Acquired - Google V01 230825
Acquired
Available on Spotify, Apple and more
An old argument for showing up at the office rather than working from home is the “synergy” you get from talking to your colleagues. I don’t know whether this works for everyone, but the chances of synergy are especially high if you’re lucky enough to sit next to The Times’s Danny Finkelstein on a Tuesday morning. This Tuesday, Danny mentioned that he had been listening to a podcast called Acquired. Had I come across it? I hadn’t. “Like The Rest Is History but for business,” he said.
A comparison with The Rest Is History is enough to persuade me to try anything.
And it turns out Danny is right. Of course he is. Acquired is brilliant. I can’t believe it hadn’t crossed my radar.
Over the course of long episodes — some clock in at more than four hours — the hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal tell the history of a company. The subjects include Rolex, Mars, Ikea, Starbucks, Hermès, Nike, Nvidia and Porsche. I’ve been absorbed by the recent instalment about Google. It’s compulsive listening: thoughtful, lucid, deeply researched and witty in a mild, unobtrusive way (far from the rule among American podcasters).
The Google story starts at Stanford in the Nineties. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are developing a new searchengine technology. Hilariously, they christen it Backrub. In the Nineties everything on the internet had a weird name; their early competitors were search engines called “Excite”, “Infoseek” and “HotBot”.
What a time to be alive.
Most search engines ranked results via a relatively crude system based on the number of relevant keywords on a given web page. So if there’s a company that has “a whole bunch of instances of ‘dog’ then that’s going to be at the top of your ranking” when you search for “dog”. This system is easily manipulated:
“If you wanted to rank highly for ‘dog food’ you just spam ‘dog food’ in invisible text all over your page.” Meanwhile, Yahoo (remember that?) was a “hand-curated guide or directory to the internet”.
Human editors collated lists of the best web pages on given topics. Amusingly, many people in the industry believed “search engines will never be able to replace human curation and human thought about what the most interesting sites on the web are”.
The Google revolution (or, more accurately but weirdly, “the Backrub revolution”) was to build a system that tracked the websites that had been most linked to, and ranked them higher accordingly. This turned out to be an excellent way of working out which websites people found most useful, and the resultant ranking has served as the “front door” of the internet ever since.
But in the Nineties, nobody had any idea how the internet was going to work. The thing was growing incredibly quickly.
Between “1993 and 1996 the web grew from 130 sites to more than 600,000”. Gilbert and Rosenthal point out that had the Google founders got started “just a year or even a couple of years later”, their task would have been “impossible”.
The web “would have got so big” that to start indexing it from scratch would have been “prohibitively expensive”.
Many failed to understand the genius of Page and Brin’s system. When the two men tried to sell Backrub to Excite (weird phrase), they were turned down. Backrub was too effective. Excite wanted to keep users on its homepage so they would spend more time looking at their banner ads.
How are you supposed to make money if your users keep finding exactly the page they need and disappearing? “D’oh!” as that other Nineties icon Homer Simpson would have remarked.
Inevitably, Page and Brin started their own company.
Investor cash flowed in. And the rest, as they say, is history.
If Acquired is not quite The Rest Is History, it’s still brilliant.
I highly recommend it. Thank you, Danny Finkelstein. How’s that for office synergy?
Thursday, August 21, 2025
DP25010 eBook Resale Bundle V01 210825
Common Types of eBook Resale Bundles
1. Private Label Rights (PLR) & Master Resell Rights (MRR) Bundles
These are collections of eBooks that come with licenses allowing you to resell, rebrand, or reuse the content:
• Books-Bundle.com offers digital asset bundles (eBooks, audiobooks, video courses, Canva templates) with reselling rights, positioning it as a platform for building passive income.
• Another version, “The Ultimate eBooks Bundle 4.0 Plus Unlimited Digital Assets”, guarantees at least $1,000 in earnings within 30 days or assistance until you succeed.
• Etsy listings offer bundles like “50,000+ eBooks” or “300,000+ PLR eBooks” with reseller licenses—typically used for side hustles or digital marketing.
• EzonDigital’s bundle includes 15,000+ eBooks with both Master Resell Rights and PLR, suitable for use in newsletters, membership sites, and more.
These bundles let buyers treat the eBooks almost like their own product—reselling, rebranding, or repackaging as desired.
2. PLR eBook Suppliers and Stores
There are businesses dedicated to creating and distributing PLR content for entrepreneurs and content creators:
• BuyQualityPLR.com offers Home Business or Business eBook bundles with MRR, often packaged with sales pages and marketing graphics.
• PLRebookSupplier.com focuses on PLR digital products for coaches, course creators, business owners, and content marketers—providing eBooks designed for broader content marketing and creation.
3. Buyer Experiences & Notes
Some feedback in discussion forums points out that services of this type typically provide large collections of eBooks that can be purchased with reseller licenses. These reviews suggest this model is common for generating passive income, though participants may vary in quality.
So, What Might “Book Bundle eBook Reseller” Refer To?
If you’ve come across the name “Book Bundle” in connection with eBook resale, it likely refers to one of the following:
• An online PLR/MRR bundle store, such as books-bundle.com or similar platforms offering large asset collections with resale rights.
• A particular eBook bundle sold on marketplaces like Etsy or specialized resale sites, often marketed with phrases like “ebook bundle with reseller rights.”
• Possibly a reseller who packages and sells PLR/MRR eBook collections under the name “Book Bundle.
If you’re specifically looking for science-focused eBook bundles with resell or PLR (Private Label Rights), here’s what I found—a mix of general-purpose PLR bundles that include science among many genres, and a few top-tier PLR platforms you can use to filter for science content.
General PLR Bundles That Include Science Content
1. Mega Ebook Bundle (Hotmart & Gumroad)
• A massive collection offering 320,000+ eBooks across 200+ genres, including 10,000+ science eBooks, all with reseller rights. Also includes PLR articles, royalty-free music, and stock video content .
2. Ebook Prima Bundle
• Offers 250,000+ eBooks (and 2,400+ audiobooks) with reseller license, weekly updates, plus a free website, hosting, and domain to quickly launch your reselling business .
3. 300,000+ PLR eBooks Bundle
• Includes eBooks across 500 genres (though science isn’t explicitly broken out), reseller rights, and bonus content like royalty-free music and video .
These bundles are enormous and include science content, but the quality varies—and they may be saturated among resellers.
PLR Platforms with Better Quality & Focus
These platforms offer individually curated or categorized eBooks (some may include science topics specifically):
• PLR.me
• High-quality, in-house written PLR eBooks across many niches, sold individually in editable formats—ideal for rebranding .
• Entrepedia
• Professionally written and designed PLR eBooks (and other media). These are well-packaged, editable, often accompanied by Canva templates and mockups .
• PLR Database
• A membership service offering access to 25k+ PLR/eBook products across many niches including education and reference—good for finding some science-related titles .
• Big Product Store
• Similar to PLR Database with thousands of PLR/multimedia digital products, available via subscription or lifetime access—applicable for broad niche content .
Tips from Real Users (Reddit Feedback)
Many resellers note that PLR content—especially massive generic bundles—often lacks uniqueness or editorial quality:
“PLR articles will have potentially thousands of exact copies out there… I have rewritten and updated many PLR articles over the years because the idea presented was sound.”
— A Redditor sharing realistic expectations about reuse and the need for rewriting
“Don’t ever use it copy and paste out of the box … just get creative and use the same formulas.”
— Another user suggesting PLR works better as a creative starting point
Your Options for Science-specific eBooks with Resale Rights
Option Type Example Platforms/Bundles Pros Cons
Huge Bundles (include science) Mega Ebook Bundle, Ebook Prima, 300k+ Bundle Large volume, affordable, instant access Mixed quality, oversaturation, lack focus
Curated PLR Platforms PLR.me, Entrepedia, PLR Database, Big Product Store Higher quality, editable, easier to rebrand Typically broader niches; need to search for science-specific content
Custom Curation DIY via platforms or freelancers Precise science niche, tailored quality Requires more effort or higher cost
What Should You Do Next?
1. Clarify Your Needs:
• Are you seeking digital science textbooks, popular-science guides, or niche topics (like astronomy, biology, physics)?
• Are you okay with rewriting and rebranding content, or do you want near-finished, polished eBooks ready to go?
2. Explore via PLR Platforms:
• Visit PLR.me or Entrepedia and search “science,” “biology,” or related terms to find high-quality, editable eBooks you can adapt.
• Use membership platforms like PLR Database or Big Product Store to browse their “Education” or “Reference” categories.
3. Evaluate Sample Content:
• Download and review sample chapters whenever possible to assess writing style, accuracy, and usability.
4. Rebranding Best Practices:
• Always rebrand or rewrite—especially for PLR content to avoid duplication issues on platforms like Amazon KDP .
• Add new value—custom graphics, updated info, personal insights can help your science eBooks stand out.
Summary
• Yes, there are large PLR eBook bundles that include science content.
• For more organized, quality eBooks, use PLR platforms like PLR.me or Entrepedia.
• Always rebrand or enhance PLR content to create unique and valuable science material.