The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) has announced that board chair Tieshena Davis will step down after just over a year in the role, Publishers Weekly reports. IBPA vice chair Renita Bryant will lead the board until it elects Davis’s successor.

When Oprah Winfrey called Richard Russo to let him know that his 2007 book Bridge of Sighs was the August Selection for Oprah’s Book Club, the author didn’t recognize the celebrity’s famous voice until the end of the conversation, according to Entertainment Weekly. “At the end of the conversation, Russo thanked the person he was speaking with and said, ‘And I missed your name.’ ‘It’s Oprah,’ the Emmy winner answered. ‘Oprah Winfrey.’ He understood then. ‘Oprah?’ Russo said before chuckling. ‘I’m so embarrassed.’”

“The fundamental trait of the novels that I like is that people are always wrong,” André Aciman tells the New Yorker. “My own life has been one of always reading people and mistaking one thing for another, so it has been very useful for me to find that the great novelists I love also seem to have been in a state of perpetual error.” Among those novels he discusses is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton and Emma by Jane Austen. 

For the Washington Post, Sibbie O’Sullivan discusses several books, including Scott Preston’s novel The Borrowed Hills (Scribner, 2024), that share what might be a suprising source of inspiration: sheep. “Who cares if they roll around in the muck? Who cares if they’re often the butt of jokes? If sheep help us to be more gentle and patient, to be more herdlike in a kind, communal way,” O’Sullivan writes, “why not make them the center of our story?” 

Fearing legal action by the state, school districts in nine Florida counties have removed hundreds of books from libraries ahead of the new school year, PEN America reports. This latest wave of book bans follows a censorship campaign launched by the Florida Department of Education against Hillsborough County, which resulted in the removal of over six hundred titles from school library shelves in May, even though these titles had no challenges filed against them and did not violate state law.

Bloomsbury is beginning to explore licensing authors’ work for AI training, focusing on academic and professional backlist titles, Publishers Lunch reports. The company is “inviting authors to opt-in to AI licensing opportunities,” though a tech company deal has not been finalized. Authors would earn a royalty rate of 20 percent of “Bloomsbury’s net receipts attributable to the relevant works.” With a position like that of the Authors Guild, a Bloomsbury spokesperson said the company believes that AI licensing is a way of protecting copyright.

The National Association of Black Bookstores (NAB2), a member-based nonprofit that aims to support and promote Black booksellers, has launched, Publishers Weekly reports. NAB2 was established by Kevin Johnson, the owner of Underground Books in Sacramento, California, who is also a former professional basketball player. Johnson says he was inspired to launch NAB2 to honor his mother, “Mother Rose” Peat West, who founded Underground Books in 2003 and died last year.

The Library of Congress said a coding error was to blame for the deletion of parts of the U.S. Constitution from Congress’s website, Ars Technica reports. “Upkeep of Constitution Annotated and other digital resources is a critical part of the Library’s mission, and we appreciate the feedback that alerted us to the error and allowed us to fix it,” the Library of Congress said in a statement.

For the New York Times Magazine, Niela Orr writes about Jamaica Kincaid and her new essay collection, Putting Myself Together: Writing, 1974–, published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Orr describes how Kincaid has carried her childhood creativity through five decades of writing: “For the person with a lifelong interest in the way power works, her power is nurturing her access to that impressionable voice, being a student and devotee of it,” Orr writes. “[Kincaid] knows that maturity is not just about repressing the inner child or cradling her but learning how to rouse her from sleep. The secret is in recognizing how much of her she still has access to.”

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation will present its inaugural Founders Award to Henry Louis Gates at its annual ceremony on October 17 in Washington, D.C. Henry Louis Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also a filmmaker, literary scholar, and cultural critic who served as an early advisor to the foundation’s founders.

Independent Publishers Group (IPG) has cut its publishing staff by a third and will reduce its title count by approximately 25 percent, Publishers Weekly reports. Joe Matthews, the CEO of IPG, has characterized the layoffs as part of “a year of transition.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $34.79 million in funding for ninety-seven humanities projects, many of which celebrate the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary, Publishers Weekly reports. Projects include the digital publication of the poet Marianne Moore’s literary notebooks; an open access edition of documents related to the naval history of the American Revolution; a digital edition of more than 13,000 speeches, letters, and other writings by Frederick Douglass; and more. Multiple projects respond to President Trump’s executive order regarding “celebrating America’s birthday.”

Kevin Breen writes for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses about how to identify generative AI in the publishing world. Breen suggests readers look out for writing that is more generalized, stories that have “perfect grammar but thin substance,” and prose that “favors summary and relies less on complex, multi-sentence exchanges of dialogue (for example).” He also encourages readers to trust their critical instincts and recommends some tools that can identify content that was generated by AI.

A first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has been discovered in a home in Bristol, England, the New York Times reports. The copy, which is one of only about 1,500 first editions printed in 1937, is up for auction and has already exceeded $25,000.

Yale Library has announced its fall exhibitions at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Fine Books & Collections reports. Open from September 2 through May 3, 2026, Textured Stories: The Chirimen Books of Modern Japan will focus on the history of illustrated Japanese crêpe-paper books, which typically feature handmade pages and stories drawn from Japanese fairy tales and folklore. Running concurrently until March 1, 2026, Unfolding Events: Exploring Past and Present in Artists’ Books will display more than thirty artists’ books by contemporary, mostly American artists.

Boundless, the successor to the failed U.K. crowdfunding publisher Unbound, has also filed for bankruptcy just months after it was established, Publishers Lunch reports. Unbound authors were promised that the new company would pay all the money owed to them and have voiced their complaints about the latest filing.

Author J.B. MacKinnon, who is based in Vancouver, has filed four proposed class action lawsuits against technology companies for illegally using copyrighted works by Canadian writers to train their LLMs, Publishers Weekly reports. MacKinnon serves as the representative plaintiff in separate suits against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks Inc. The lawsuits claim these companies took steps to explicitly conceal their copyright infringement, removing copyright information of books before feeding them into their AI systems, and instructing their LLMs to respond misleadingly when asked about the use of copyrighted text.

Alissa Wilkinson of the New York Times considers a new documentary, Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, directed by Ebs Burnough, which takes as its subject Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road and follows three threads of inquiry: the author’s early life; the 1957 novel’s influence on writers, actors, storytellers and artists; and examples of Americans who could be said to be following in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven. According to Wilkinson, the doc “crams too much into its run time but not without cause: There’s just a lot to cover.”

Kelly Jensen of Book Riot offers an overview of the anti-book ban laws that have passed in a number of states in 2025, including examples of the four Rs of book censorship (a term and classification coined by Emily Knox): Restriction, Redaction, Relocation, and Removal. 

Publishers Weekly reports on a new e-book platform called Briet that invites publishers to sell their e-books to libraries outright, providing universal, perpetual access to titles while avoiding the thorny issues of licensing and hold times. The new digital platform is an initiative of the Brick House publishing cooperative and the Flaming Hydra collective of journalists and artists.