Can Ukraine restore its pre-war borders? Is Russia testing NATO with aerial incursions in Europe? Boris Akunin is one of Russia's most popular authors. Erast Fandorin, his series of historical detective novels, has been adapted into feature films and TV miniseries. But he is also an enemy of the state, having been branded a "foreign agent" by the Russian authorities last year. Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili, has been outspoken against President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Google logo is seen through the broken glass in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on ... [ ] February 28, 2020. Many of us born before the Internet era remember life before search. To get an answer to a simple question we either asked someone with that knowledge, went to the library, or, used the Yellow Pages. In just six years from 1995 to 2001 we went from bulletin board systems (BBSs), to websites that could be accessed with browsers, to link aggregators and online directories, to search. We saw how Yahoo and free volunteer-curated link directories like the Open Directory Project (ODP) became the dominant online "Yellow Pages" for the entire Internet.

CONTENTshift is the accelerator program of the German Book Publishers and Printers Association. Below you will find more interviews from past batches. We used to record the interviews directly at Frankfurt Book Fair, but since it is canceled this year due to Corona, we resorted to remote only interviews. At the time of the recording, we did not know who won the final award. We will publish the exclusive interview with them as the last of our series this year.

"We are standing on the beach, watching a fast-approaching tsunami, and all that we have around us are a few pieces of driftwood. We can continue trying to build a shelter from the driftwood in the few seconds that we have remaining, or we can figure out how we are going to use the driftwood to ride the ineluctable wave." I thought of this analogy when I was at a recent meeting held between some of the key players in the book production industry in South Africa. I heard many complaints of how "various philanthropists are bypassing the official library chain in South Africa by establishing libraries", "the number of books that were being registered on an official registry are lower than previous years" and so on. In many ways, I could picture myself sitting in a meeting with key players in the music industry about 12 years ago, around the same time that the likes of Spotify were gaining traction, and they would have been having similar discussions focused on the future of music.

With the advancements in the field of artificial intelligence, many sectors have been in fear of losing human employees over this advanced technology. And with the rise of machines amid this crisis for business continuity, the fear has started looming in the journalism industry where media houses are publishing automated news for their publications. In fact, Bloomberg News, one of the leading media publishing houses, has claimed that the company has been using automated technology for publishing one-third of their news content on their platform. According to news reports: Editor-in-chief John Micklethwait of Bloomberg News stated in their company memo a few years back, "I think automation is crucial to the future of journalism in a much broader way than many of us realise. Bloomberg already uses automation for customised news and trending stories …" Also, in the recent news, Microsoft has announced laying off a considerable number of journalists from their MSN in order to replace them with artificial intelligence.

Publishers are the gatekeepers of modern literature. As technology advances, both traditional publishing houses and self-publishing authors benefit from technology-enabled tools and analytics which were previously not available. There is already a wide variety of tools for all stages of publishing. These do not only help automate daunting processes, but also give power to new independent voices by making self-publishing more accessible. From automated formatting to royalty management software, here are eight ways that AI helps take publishing to the next level. Publishing has always been rife with plagiarism, even in cases of large publishers, such as Grand Central Publishing.

In the not-so-distant past, the gatekeepers to publishing were large publishing houses. They guarded this right jealously, and self-publishing books was looked upon with disdain. These days, it is often impossible to distinguish high-quality self-published books from those that received traditional backing. As Forbes notes, self-published writers are now becoming tiny publishing houses of their own by outsourcing the talent they need to make their books a success. Artificial intelligence has only helped to make the whole process easier.

China's IT giants aim to change the advertising business with artificial intelligence tools meant to complement human creativity. Alibaba Group Holding boasts a system that can generate 20,000 lines of ad copy in a second. Founder Group, a company that originated at Peking University, has developed a tool for proofing the colorful and often chaotic flyers that are common in Japan. Using Alibaba's free AI Copywriter, merchants and marketers can produce ads on Alibaba-owned e-commerce websites such as Taobao and Tmall. Clients feed the system links to their product pages and choose what kind of copy they want -- say, promotional, functional, poetic or heartwarming.