A new website containing a searchable database of works eligible for the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, as well as a portal for filing claims, was recently launched, Publishers Lunch reports. “Authors who think their books might have been pirated can search the Anthropic works list by title, author, publisher, or ISBN, and the site will provide a US Copyright Office registration number they will need to file a claim.”

At least fifteen libraries at U.S. colleges and universities have been the targets of bomb threats in the past week, according to Book Riot. “Officials have linked these bomb threats, as well as less location-specific threats received this week, as part of a swatting effort. Swatting is criminal harassment that purposefully deceives law enforcement into believing there is an emergency at a particular address, encouraging a significant response. It can be considered an act of stochastic terrorism.”

Solange Knowles has launched the Saint Heron Community Library, “a literary center dedicated to students, artists, creatives and general book/literature enthusiasts interested in exploring and studying the breadth of artistic expression.” The library, containing primarily out-of-print, rare, and first-edition books by writers of color, is free of charge and allows each borrower to reserve one book, which will be shipped directly to the borrower for a term of forty-five days, with complimentary shipping and return postage, “ensuring the library remains free to readers.”

Bookshop.org has launched an e-book platform in the U.K. that allows independent bookstores to sell digital books, the Guardian reports. Stores will keep 100 percent of the profits. 

Chapter Ukraine, a collaboration among Ukrainian Book Institute, Craft magazine, PEN Ukraine, and others, is working “to make Ukrainian literature more accessible worldwide” by offering “comprehensive information about Ukrainian books available in translation,” according to Publishing Perspectives. “Initially, the focus has been on the United States’ English-language audience, the home of a volunteer communications campaign to support the effort. That advocacy is calibrated ‘to raise awareness among international readers and expand the presence of Ukrainian books on library and bookstore shelves’ at international scale.”

Patrizia Zelano, an Italian photographer, captured images of century-old books she salvaged from historic flooding in Venice in November 2019, when the combination of strong winds, a tidal peak, and a fast-moving cyclone resulted in 85 percent of the city being underwater, the BBC reports. “On her two-day adventure, Zelano salvaged 40 books. Though most are now unreadable, her photographs of the ruined books tell the story of the fragility of the lagoon and its cultural heritage—as well as a push towards possible solutions.”

PEN America has released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024–2025 school year, warning that a “disturbing normalization of censorship” is happening in public schools, where the number of books challenged or banned has risen exponentially, NPR reports. “According to the new report, the most-banned book in the country in the 2023-24 school year was Anthony Burgess’ 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, followed by Patricia McCormick’s 2006 young adult title Sold, a fictional account of a girl sold into sexual slavery in India that was named one of the American Library Association’s best YA books.”

CNN looks at Africa’s book publishing industry in light of a report by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) that estimates Africa’s publishing industry generated only $7 billion in 2023, accounting for just 5.4 percent of the global book market, which is valued at $129 billion. “Today, you see that most of the names of authors of literature in Africa are more known outside the continent than inside the continent. They’re known in their country, but they’re not circulating between the other countries, and that’s an issue,” says Ernesto Ottone Ramírez, assistant director-general for culture at UNESCO. The report blames “weak polices, an absence of tax incentives, and a reliance on imported books for the lack of industry growth within Africa.”

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation recently announced the winners of the 2025 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Kaveh Akbar won in the fiction category for Martyr! (Random House); Priscilla Morris is the runner-up for Black Butterflies (Knopf). Sunil Amrith won the nonfiction prize for The Burning Earth: A History (Norton); Lauren Markham is the runner-up for A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging (Random House). The winners each receive $10,000; the runners-up each receive $5,000. The foundation also announced that Salman Rushdie is the recipient of the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

The supermarket chain Publix is facing calls for a boycott after withdrawing as the sponsor of the Black Book Bash in Jacksonville, Florida, just days before the event, Atlanta Black Star reports. “The three-day festival, set for Oct. 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency, is a celebration of Black literature and culture where readers can meet authors, shop from Black-owned businesses, and visit vendors and bookstores. Publix had been positioned as the title sponsor, but organizers say the company abruptly pulled out, citing the ‘political climate.’” Organizers insist the festival will go on. “This is bigger than books. This is about Black stories. Black joy. Black freedom,” they wrote in a statement on Instagram.

The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, an annual award for “outstanding debut literary works by first-generation immigrants,” has a new name, the Kellman Prize for Immigrant Literature, after Steven Kellman, “a comparative literature professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and longtime Restless board member,” donated $300,000 to the award’s sponsor, Restless Books, Publishers Weekly reports.

ReaderLink’s deal to acquire book distributor Baker & Taylor that was in place and scheduled to close last week has been terminated, Publishers Lunch reports. Baker & Taylor is the largest supplier of library content, software, and services to public and academic libraries in the United States. “Baker & Taylor’s open invoices with publishers were to remain with the current owners, and publishers were expressing concern about getting paid,” Michael Cader writes. There has been no formal statement about why the deal was terminated.

In an effort to generate new interest in Rowan Oak, the home of William Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, curators have refurbished a 1916 quarter grand piano that belonged to the author’s wife, Estelle Oldman, the New York Times reports. “The instrument was refurbished this summer, and on Thursday evening its fuller, back-in-tune notes rang through the parlor once again during a concert marking Faulkner’s birthday. Rowan Oak’s curators hope it will be the first of many such evenings.”

Trinity University Press will cease operations at the end of 2026 due to rising costs and in response to, as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the university in San Antonio is quoted as stating, “strategic needs of the university,” Publishers Weekly reports. The report comes less than a month after Bucknell University Press in Lewisberg, Pennsylvania, announced that it, too, would close next year. 

Oregon ArtsWatch surveys the literary landscape in Oregon amid moves by the Trump administration to shutter the Institute for Museum & Library Services, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the National Endowment for the Humanities. “The actions have led to turmoil among Oregon’s arts, cultural, and literary organizations,” Amanda Waldroupe writes. Among the literary organizations affected are Fishtrap, a writing center in Enterprise, Oregon, that declined funding from the NEA because, as executive director Shannon McNerney wrote, “the current policies of the NEA no longer align with Fishtrap’s mission and values.” 

The Stanford Daily takes stock of Stanford University’s creative writing program a year after the school announced it was phasing out all twenty-three of the creative writing lecturers over the course of the next two years. “Many students and lecturers have expressed their disappointment in the decision in the last year. According to lecturer Sarah Frisch, last year was the first time she was able to receive a livable wage due to the lecturers’ previous year of advocating for a pay raise. This was her last year.”

The California federal judge presiding over Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlment has granted preliminary approval of the deal to resolve authors’ class action lawsuit over the AI company’s downloading of millions of pirated books, Bloomberg reports. “Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of the 482,460 books it downloaded from pirate libraries Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, and destroy the original and copied files. The parties struck a deal in August after the AI startup said it faced ‘inordinate pressure’ to settle and avoid paying upwards of $1 trillion in statutory damages at a trial scheduled for December.”

The American Booksellers Association has named LeVar Burton as its Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2025-2026, Publishers Weekly reports. “As ambassador, Burton will champion indie bookstores, especially on Small Business Saturday (Nov. 29, 2025) and Independent Bookstore Day (Apr. 25, 2026).” Burton is the latest in a line of ambassadors that includes Celeste Ng, Amanda Gorman, and Trevor Noah.

“Nightmare,” a previously unpublished short story by Ramond Chandler, has been published by the Strand magazine, the Guardian reports. The magazine’s managing editor, Andrew Gulli, discovered the story “among a cache of papers belonging to Chandler’s secretary and later-life companion Jean Vounder-Davis.”

The New York Times raises questions about billionaire author Amy Griffin’s best-selling memoir The Tell, published by the Dial Press in March and lauded by celebrity influencers from Oprah Winfrey to Reese Witherspoon, in which Griffin writes about engaging in “illegal psychedelic-drug therapy,” during which she “recovered memories of being raped on many occasions by a middle-school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, starting when she was 12.” Online reviews as well as the Times reporters themselves, Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan, question the legitimacy of memories retrieved under the influence of MDMA and point to a lack of fact-checking for most memoirs. “Book publishers are not investigators,” Whitney Frick, the author’s editor at the Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, is quoted as saying. “This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”