This morning, Kathleen Fitzpatrick drew my attention to a Mastodon post by Babette Knauer about plans for the University of Groningen to get away from Big Tech. The article itself is well worth a read, with ambitious approaches to digital independence. I had some not-very-original thoughts on it.

Ten years ago, I had a bad cold. This was not unusual as I have hypogammaglobulinemia (which means an abnormally low concentration of gamma globulin in the blood that leads to an increased risk of infection). But this cold was pretty terrible and quickly led to a secondary bacterial infection requiring antibiotics. I was coughing a lot and very hard. And I was starting to get headaches. That should have worried me far earlier than it did.

A pivotal moment in my academic career, or at least one I remember clearly, was when a very senior professor in the US sent me his book proposal for an academic book/monograph on the author Thomas Pynchon. The other thing he included was a crossed off list of all the presses he had courted with the proposal and with whom he had not succeeded.

Today’s tech anomaly was odd. I’m working on a new WordPress theme and obviously WordPress has to load its assets like the CSS file and the JavaScript file. I just added some new code to the home page template and suddenly my CSS was not loading. In fact it was pointing to the next theme in the list, Blockbase, and loading its CSS. Nothing I could do with caching resolved this in the slightest.

The inaugural SHARPIES, a global book history festival celebrating work in book history from around the world, will take place from July 7–9, 2026 (although these dates vary according to time zone). All the events are free for SHARP members, but registration is required. Registration will open in March 2026.

How much time do you spend performing various activities? In 2022, I spent 506 hours answering email, or 63 full work-day’s worth of time. At that point, my reading for pleasure had dropped to virtually nil and I just thought: this is not how I want to spend my time. After a radical reorganization of my life and work, I wanted to see how well I have done this year. The answer is… 108 hours spent answering email.

Shadow libraries, that is, illegal massive repositories of books of all kinds, are of course prone to takedowns by police and disappearance from the internet. In recent days, one of the most prominent shadow libraries, Library Genesis (libgen), was taken down and its archive removed from public consumption. The takedown of LibGen was no massive shock. Indeed, several projects were already continuing LibGen’s legacy.

Since I last wrote, I have had a few more thoughts on Samuel Moore’s book. Again, these are not necessarily things that he does not discuss or things that he should have discussed. They are merely thoughts that occurred to me in response to reading his work.

On Christmas day, we had a quiet time this year. One of the things I did was to read Moore, Samuel A., Publishing Beyond the Market: Open Access, Care, and the Commons (University of Michigan Press, 2025). This is a most enjoyable book that outlines a project and worldview that I know Sam has been cultivating and refining for many years. I should stress that I am not writing a “review” here.

There has been a major furore in recent days on social media about the rise in AI citations that have been hallucinated. These citations appear in manuscripts sent out for peer review, and even in the published literature.

This year we had a familiar argument in my household about when the Christmas tree should go up. My other half insists that it should be a late arrival, just a few days before Christmas ideally, whereas I would prefer to have the month of December as a lead up and infused with festive spirit, etc. In the end, because my mother was coming to visit, we decided that it would go up around the 14th or so of December.