Sales of adult books dropped 9.6% in the month, with fiction sales off 8.3% and nonfiction falling 11.3%. For the first five months of 2025 adult book sales were down 4%, with fiction falling 4.9% and nonfiction down 2.7%. - Publishers Weekly
While younger generations, at least, have said in recent years that they want to see more platonic friendship and less sex on screen, reading appetites appear to be going in the other direction, with a huge boom in romance and “romantasy” – the romance-fantasy hybrid driven by TikTok. - The Guardian
There is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever, thanks to an increase in booksellers who trade in “books by the metre”. - The Guardian
Poetry has always been political. The writer and civil-rights activist Audre Lorde argued it produces “a revelatory distillation of experience”. In other words, by distilling aspects of an experience, poetry can reveal powerful truths about reality. - The Conversation
Edge-painted books are now so widespread that you can find them at Walmart. The feature has spread from romance and fantasy to horror, thrillers and even literary fiction; it’s spread from works by famous authors with ravenous followings to those by debut novelists hoping to make a splash. - Washington Post
The researchers tested two models each from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, and found that journalism was by far the most common source for composing answers to queries (with the four outlets in the headline among the most frequently cited) — and that blocking journalistic sources often led to outdated or inaccurate answers. - Nieman Lab
Adapting an alphabet-based machine to produce the thousands of different brush-stroke characters used in Chinese was a seemingly impossible challenge. But, in the 1930s one Chinese linguist-inventor in Manhattan succeeded. But only one of his typewriters was ever made, and that one was feared lost. - The New York Times
“Patrick Soon-Shiong will retain majority ownership of the Los Angeles Times in his planned public sale, which will be limited to $75 million after the paper is combined with some of his other media ventures.” - TheWrap
The plan addresses national policy, library legislation, and local connections. “While libraries serve as a cornerstone of democracy the world over, we operate within the circumstances we’re provided,” they said. “We grow and ebb and flow with the communities we serve. - Publishers Weekly
“As more companies explore AI literary translation, the rapid progression of the technology and what that could mean for the future has divided the book industry.” - The Bookseller (UK)
Prolific writers are simultaneously envied and dismissed, admired and snarked about. There is the sense that a writer can write too much, that whatever results can’t be very good.
On 9 June, the Harvard Education Publishing Group, the journal’s publisher, abruptly canceled the release. In an email to the issue’s contributors, the publisher cited “a number of complex issues”, shocking authors and editors alike, the Guardian has learned. - The Guardian
What made libraries so exciting? They were hardly novelties. Roman writers like Cicero and the two Plinies assembled rich collections of books in their city houses and country villas. - London Review of Books
