Editorial 277

Children’s Books: who’s winning?

March is a busy month for prizes, with the winner of the Nero Gold Prize announced as well as the shortlists for the Children’s Book Award and Carnegie Medals. It was particularly sad therefore to hear that Oscar’s Book Prize is closing. Set up over 10 years ago by Viveka Alvestrand and James Ashton in memory of their young son, the prize celebrated picture books ‘that spark wonder, comfort and connection in the earliest years of life’ with winners including Chris Haughton, Benji Davies and Polly Noakes amongst others. It’s not proved possible to find a sponsor.

Also looking for a backer is the unique and important Little Rebels Award, run by Letterbox Library and Housmans’ Bookshop on behalf of the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. The Award is paused this year, and Catherine Barter of Housmans Bookshop explains, ‘Like so many endeavours across the book world, the Little Rebels Award runs mostly on love and enthusiasm, and relies on a huge amount of unpaid work. As organisers we’ve temporarily reached a point where it’s unsustainable. But we hope that this pause will allow us to regroup and come back with a bang in 2027.’ If you know of potential sponsors or sources of funding, contact the organisers via info@letterboxlibrary.com.

There’s good news though with the announcement of The Barrington Stoke Reader of the Year Award. Launched by the School Library Association in collaboration with Barrington Stoke, the award will celebrate young readers, recognising pupils in Year 7 and 8 who ‘have overcome challenge to discover the joy of reading.’

The School Library Association are also celebrating the receipt of £500,000 from the Charlotte Aitken Trust. The funding will deliver 1,000 social book clubs in over 100 secondary school libraries in London, the West Midlands and North East of England as part of a scheme called Reading Reboot, which aims to transform how the most disadvantaged and disengaged young people interact with literature and reading. With a focus on Year 8 pupils, the age at which reading for pleasure often shows the steepest decline, and the year group that will soon be subject to a new mandatory reading test, Reading Reboot will deliver ten-week book clubs, run in dedicated spaces within school libraries, by specially trained school librarians.

Key components of the book club sessions will be dedicated space and time for reading engagement within the school timetable, supported by senior leadership teams; dedicated book stock, with 100+ new books provided to each participating school; free choice of book titles for participating pupils and a removal of the pressure to read.

Reading Reboot builds on a proven model, piloted in collaboration with Farshore and HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2024. We look forward to reporting on the results.

State schools can sign up to receive more information about the Reading Reboot programme now.

AI update

The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee have published a report on AI, copyright and the creative industries.

The report’s recommendations included:

• Rejecting a broad copyright exception for AI training
• Supporting a ‘licensing-first’ approach to AI development
• Establishing meaningful transparency requirements around AI developers’ training data

The report acknowledges the importance of protecting the UK’s copyright system and supporting the development of measures to enable a licensing regime that will balance use of content with appropriate compensation to authors and suggests a potential future where ‘the UK becomes a world-leading home for responsible, licensing-based artificial intelligence (AI) development, where commercial model developers using UK content obtain permission, pay fair remuneration to rightsholders and can deploy their models without questions of legal liability’ and acknowledges the importance of ‘a “gold-standard” copyright framework, which rewards creativity, supports sustainable business models for creative work, and commands international respect’ to achieve this.

ALCS is working closely with partners to explore and develop a licensing framework aimed at ensuring that authors are properly recognised and remunerated when their works are used to train and develop generative AI systems. Collective licensing for AI is still in its early stages but represents an important step towards bringing about transparency, accountability, and fair value exchange into the AI ecosystem.

More on this no doubt in the months ahead and read the report in full here.