Some experts say Substack’s rise fits into a longer arc in publishing, one shaped by the early wave of self-publishing tools like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords in the late aughts. Those platforms opened the door for self-published authors, but didn’t solve the marketing problem. - Fast Company
PEN America’s report released Thursday called “Facts & Fiction: Stories Stripped Away by Book Bans” found that 3,743 unique titles were removed from school libraries and classrooms between July 2024 and June 2025. This included 1,102 nonfiction titles. - The Hill
“PEN America analysed the 3,743 unique titles removed from school libraries and classrooms in the (2024-25) July to June period and found that over 1,100 or 29% were non-fiction, more than double the year prior. The most common theme in the banned non-fiction books was activism and social movements.” - The Guardian
“A publishing house is not meant to be a propaganda machine. It is a place where conflict, doubt and nuance can, and should, coexist. ... Grasset’s authors rarely agreed on much, but as the letter of protest we signed said, we have had — and still have — a common enemy: authoritarianism.” - The New York Times
“Before it was a movie, Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada, published by Broadway Books in 2003, marked the absolute high point of that once-ubiquitous genre. … Soon after the success of the novel, chick lit started to fall apart,” with dedicated imprints long since discontinued. - Publishers Weekly
Five leading publishers and a best-selling author filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant violated copyright law by training its generative artificial intelligence platform on millions of illegally pirated books and articles. - Washington Post
Five large publishing houses, along with Scott Turow representing authors as a class, allege in their filing that Zuckerberg himself “personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement” of copyrights by Meta, which used countless books and articles to train Llama, its AI language system. - AP
Kraus’s Angel Down took fiction honors; Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us won for general nonfiction; Lepore’s We the People took history honors; Vaill’s study of the Schuyler sisters, Pride and Pleasure, won for biography; Li’s Things In Nature Merely Grow won for memoir; Spahr’s Ars Poetica was honored for poetry. - Literary Hub
At least 17 authors have ended their contracts with UQP or vowed not to work with the publisher again, after a series of events stemming from responses to the Israel-Gaza war culminated in last week’s cancellation of a children’s book by the Indigenous poet Jazz Money. - The Guardian
“Even a book that I know I wouldn’t enjoy now would still be interesting to read, to figure out how both it and I had changed. And there is always the possibility that I would enjoy it after all. Books are always surprising you.” - The Guardian (UK)
Chinguetti developed as a trading post on the trans-Sahara caravan route to Timbuktu — and, as in Timbuktu, over the centuries Chinguetti families came to amass important collections of medieval manuscripts on religion, law, and science. Now, as the population dwindles and the desert sand encroaches, preserving these collections is a challenge. - The Dial
The three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit wrote that HB 710 enables a “system of informal censorship” and potentially “encourages formal censorship through the legal process. The First Amendment does not tolerate either outcome.” - Publishers Weekly
“(The Guardian) has found a lane in the U.S. news market as a progressive alternative to institutional American media, … backed by a voluntary contribution model that has attracted 700,000 supporters, 500,000 of them recurring. Reader revenue has grown 35% a year for the past two years, with a still-growing 150-person newsroom.” - The Rebooting
“Scholars from Trinity College Dublin uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome. Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century.” - The Guardian
“We’ve had success in blue states that want to protect from book banning at the local level, but these efforts have moved to purple or even red states, to the point of Alaska now moving this forward." - Publishers Weekly
