U.S. title output reached roughly four million in 2025, up about 32 percent in a single year, and around 3.5 million of those were self-published titles with ISBNs, up nearly 39 percent on the year before. Self-published books outnumbered traditionally published ones by more than five to one. - Rachel Alterberry
“Experts say the revival in some of them is driven partly by second- and third-generation Africans in the diaspora finding it easier to reconnect with their roots and communicate with older relatives, thanks to social media, online learning and entertainment.” - AP
The survey will talk to 5,000 book buyers and profile them by genre, covering how they discover books across every channel—including social media and other digital tools—where and how they buy, and their mix of print, e-book, and audio, with a deeper look at audio habits, subscription behavior, etc. - Publishers Weekly
The nonfiction collapse has profound implications for the industry. Nonfiction, historically, has always been seen as the more stable part of the business for logical reasons. The demand for nonfiction has always felt more predictable than fiction. - Dear Head of Mine
Vendler spent a lifetime – which ended in April 2024 – writing about lyric poetry. She believed literary criticism was about the pleasure of describing complex things and conveying the joy of understanding them to others. - London Review of Books
“Pinsky, an acclaimed poet and translator who served as U.S. laureate under the auspices of the Library of Congress from 1997-2000, won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He has long enjoyed recognition beyond the poetry world, even making public appearances with fellow New Jersey native Bruce Springsteen.” - AP
In 1957, undercover police bought a copy of the poetry collection which featured “Howl” at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco — and proceeded to arrest owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti and manager Shig Murao for selling obscene material. Their trial set a major precedent in First Amendment case law. - BBC (MSN)
We appreciate that each of us is a link in a millennia-long chain of language, connected to people over the centuries by the words they bequeathed us. Following where, and through whom, that chain has passed is the business of etymology. - Psyche
Having identified books as the “highest quality source of training data” for Anthropic’s L.L.M.s, it initiated a covert program called Project Panama, defined succinctly in court documents as “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” “Destructively scan” means precisely that. - The New Yorker
I don’t read Pauline Kael to track my sensibility with hers on an aesthetic oscilloscope. I read her because I think she—more than any writer I know, including Agee—brings the whole of herself to writing about movies. - Hedgehog Review
