AI ate this website and the solution is... more AI.

I'm exaggerating a little, you are after all (probably) reading this on the website which therefore can't be totally broken. What has been broken is the popular history books database that I have been maintaining for the last three or four years, showing all hardback history book publications (that I can find) in the UK: those books aimed at the general market rather than academia. With luck it may be up and running at the point in time you are read this. (What hasn't broken is the reviews and articles that we write. If you want to find out about the small subset of popular history books that we have reviewed, you still can. If you want to find out about any of the other fascinating and valuable history books, you can't. At least, not here!) What's happened? The short version is that one or more AI companies scraped it to death. What does this mean? In order to build or maintain the sort of large language AI model which can contain everything that has ever been written down on the…