Library Journal shares details from Clarivate’s annual “Pulse of the Library” report that shows “a growing number of libraries are exploring or implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025 (67 percent, compared with 63 percent in 2024), although the majority are in the earliest evaluation stages.” The report, based on a survey of 2,032 librarians from 109 countries representing academic, public, and national libraries, “also notes that there is a wide variation between academic and public libraries with AI adoption.”

Publishers Weekly unpacks a recent report from the Association of American Publishers that shows books sales continued to fall in August. “Total industry sales were down 4.4 percent in the month compared to last August and sales fell in every segment. The report, based on data from 1,320 publishers, followed a July report in which total sales were down 4.2 percent.”

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, laid off thirteen staff members this week, bringing the total number of layoffs to thirty-one in the past few months, KOIN 6 News reports. “As with many businesses right now, we’re seeing expenses rise faster than sales,” a Powell’s spokesperson is quoted as saying.

Porter Anderson of Publishing Perspectives looks at AI usage in the publishing industry, sorting through data revealed in a September 2025 study by the Book Industry Study Group. According to the study, which surveyed people working for publishers, libraries, and service providers or vendors, “slightly lesss than half of inviduals are using AI for work now” and “the majority of organizations that are using AI lack formal policies or guidelines.” The study also shows that “31 percent of respondents said they are ethically opposed to the use of AI; 33 percent said they’re not interested in using AI to support their work; and 43 percent said AI training is not a good use of their time.”

In an essay for the Rumpus, Sean Cho A. writes about the experience of teaching college students during the rise of artificial intelligence. “A chatbot can generate lecture slides with more efficient scaffolding than I ever will. A bot can sort discussion board posts by keyword or sentiment. But bots will never notice the shift in someone’s voice when they say ‘home’ versus when they say ‘mother.’ It will never register the second eye-roll, the one meant not for disdain but for solidarity. It will never mishear ‘Homeric’ as ‘homely’ and accidentally create an entire week’s worth of discussion about what makes a hero.”

Two novels by George Orwell have been translated into Welsh for the first time, the BBC reports. Animal Farm (1945) is set in northwest Wales in the Welsh edition, published by Melin Bapur, “with Orwell’s classic characters given Welsh names to add authenticity,” and 1984, published in 1949, “contains a Welsh version of Newspeak, the novel’s fictional language.”

More than three hundred writers, scholars, and public figures, including past contributors to the newspaper, have refused to write for the New York Times Opinion section in a collective effort “to hold the paper accountable for its role in the genocide in Gaza,” according to the Wire. Among the signatories of the public statement are authors Sally Rooney, Kiese Laymon, Catherine Lacey, Kaveh Akbar, Mosab Abu Toha, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jia Tolentino, and Omar El Akkad.

Sam Spratford of Publishers Weekly writes about a new coworking, continuing education, and community space for writers, agents, and editors in San Francisco. The Backstory Above, opening in the city’s Sunset District on November 1, aims “to help members of the San Francisco literary community deepen their craft, create and collaborate with each other in a peaceful working environment.”

The United States has revoked Nobel Prize–winning author Wole Soyinka’s U.S. visa, Reuters reports.  On Tuesday the author shared a letter from the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos requesting that he “bring his passport for physical cancellation of the visa.” Soyinka, 91, said in 2016 “that he had torn up his U.S. green card and renounced his American residency in protest at the first election of President Donald Trump.”

The UK’s Black British Book Festival is launching a publishing collaboration with Pan Macmillan, “focusing on ‘raw talent,’ in particular writers who have not been traditionally published,” according to the Guardian. The first adult and children’s titles will be commissioned for publication in 2027.

OpenAI’s motion to dismiss a consolidated class action suit over ChatGPT has been denied by a distric court judge in New York, Publishers Lunch reports. “The suit combines lawsuits from authors including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, Kai Bird, and Victor LaValle, as well as the Authors Guild, alleging that ChatGPT’s outputs are similar to the authors’ work and constitute copyright infringement.” In denying OpenAI’s motion, the judge determined that the plaintiffs’ argument “is strong enough to go to trial.”

The director of the University of Minnesota Press, Douglas Armato, is retiring after twenty-seven years of leading the Minneapolis-based publisher. “A national search for the next director of the University of Minnesota Press is expected to begin in Fall 2026. Associate Director Susan Doerr and Associate Director for Book Publishing Emily Hamilton will act as co-interim directors until the Press welcomes a new director.”

A coalition of seven charitable foundations—the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation—today announced the launch of the Literary Arts Fund, an effort to “dramatically boost the essential yet critically underfunded nonprofit literary arts field in the United States,” according to a press release from the Mellon Foundation. “The fund, initiated by Mellon as a collaborative effort in service of the field’s needs and promise, will distribute at least $50 million over the next five years, with continued fundraising planned.” The Literary Arts Fund will award grants to U.S. literary nonprofit organizations and publishers that support contemporary writers of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or hybrid literary forms through an annual open call beginning November 10. Full guidelines and eligibility details are available at literaryartsfund.org.

Simon & Schuster is suing the estate of Nelson DeMille for $1.275 million over a novel he didn’t finish, according to Publishers Lunch. The publisher contends in the filing “that the DeMille estate owes the publisher a $635,000 advance paid on the acceptance and delivery of an outline for his third book, ‘Explorers Club,’ which he had not completed when he died in 2024. They also seek one third of the initial signing advance of $1.92 million paid to DeMille when he signed a $15.3 million three-book deal in 2014.”

A cache of recently-discovered letters by W. H. Auden reveals how the English poet “developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the...author’s home and was put on trial,” the Guardian reports. A hundred letters spanning roughly a decade between the early 1960s and 1970s “are written in enthusiastically colloquial—if frequently misspelt and agrammatical—German” to the man “he affectionally called ‘Hugerl’ in the posthumously published poem ‘Glad.’”

The superintendent of Mississinewa High School in Gas City, Indiana, has canceled a production of “Between the Lines,” a musical based on Jodi Picoult’s novel of the same title, due to concerns “over ‘sexual innuendo’ and alcohol references in the musical,” the Associated Press reports. 

HarperCollins is building a 1.6 million-square-foot “supply chain logistics facility” in Brownsburg, Indiana, according to Publishers Weekly. “Once completed, the site will have the capacity to ship more than 300 million books annually to more than 100 countries around the world, according to the publisher, and is expected to create more than 400 supply chain logistics jobs.”

The Booker Prize Foundation has launched the Children’s Booker Prize, the Guardian reports. The new award, which will offer £50,000 (approximately $66,628) for the best fiction written for readers ages eight to twelve, “will be decided by a mixed panel of adult and child judges.” The foundation will also give 30,000 copies of shortlisted and winning books to children each year. “The initiative comes amid reports that children’s reading for pleasure is at its lowest level in twenty years.”

A district court judge in Texas “has again ruled that Texas’s ‘READER Act,’ which would require booksellers to rate every book they sell to public school libraries based on vague notions of ‘sexually explicit material,’ is unconstitutional,” according to Publishers Lunch. reports. He issued a permanent injunction against the law.

Nancy Miller, the publishing director of the adult trade division of Bloomsbury U.S., will step down and take the position of executive editor for the division starting next year, Publishers Weekly reports. “The announcement coincides with the release of Bloomsbury Publishing’s financial results from the first half of the year, which shows a decline in sales and profits following a record fiscal 2025.”