Hundreds of literary tourists are traveling to Prague to see artwork made of books, reports Literary Hub. Thanks to BookTok, visitors are heading to the capital of the Czech Republic to see “The Idiom,” a sculpture made by Slovak artist Matej Kren that consists of 8,000 books and forms a cylindrical tower “with a tear-shaped entrance and mirrors at each end” that creates an “endless” tunnel for visitors to enjoy. The piece was installed at Prague’s Municipal Library in 1998, and three years ago it went viral on TikTok. As a result, the sculpture can draw up to a thousand tourists a day during peak seasons such as the holidays.

For the second year in a row, print book sales were up, reports Publishers Weekly. Based on data compiled by Circana BookScan, there was a .3% increase in print book sales from 2024 to 2025, with 762.4 million books being bought last year. Sales peaked in 2021 at 839.7 million copies, though they’re now at higher levels than they were before the pandemic. Postpandemic, adult fiction has taken the sales lead. Graphic novels and romance books had a 9.2% and 3.9% increase, respectively, while fantasy book sales fell by 8.7%. Publishers hoped for higher numbers for 2025. 

The New York Times has reported on the passing of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s toddler on January 6. The famous novelist shared details regarding the death of her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, in a WhatsApp group chat with family and close friends, the content of which has been leaked to the public. Adichie stated that his passing was due to an overdose of a sedative while he was being treated for an infection at the private Euracare Hospital in Lagos. Euracare officials are investigating the matter, though the passing of Adichie’s son has prompted an outpouring of complaints about Nigeria’s health care system. 

A press release from Folio Literary Management has announced the agency’s acquisition of the Greenhouse Literary Agency from Coolabi Group. Folio describes the move as “expanding Folio’s children’s division and reinforcing its commitment to representing exceptional children’s book authors and illustrators.” Greenhouse’s full backlist and client list will transfer to Folio, as will current Greenhouse staff. “We are thrilled to be moving from strength to strength and look forward with excitement to what the future holds for our clients’ careers at Folio Jr,.” says Chelsea Eberly, who will join Folio as vice president, transitioning from her role as director at Greenhouse.

At a moment when polls show 40 percent of American adults did not read a book in the last year, one book is nonetheless selling at record rates: the Bible. Publishers Weekly reports that Bible sales hit record highs in the United States and the U.K. in 2025, continuing an upward sales trend begun in 2021. Mark Schoenwald, CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, notes that study Bibles are among the iterations of the text with sales that have soared: “What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”

A new deadline has been set for writers to opt-out or make objections in the lawsuit being brought against AI corporation Anthropic, Publishers Lunch reports. Judge Araceli Martinez-Oluguin has extended the deadline from January 7 to the revised deadline of January 29, allowing writers more time to exclude themselves from the class-action case and pursue different legal recourse. “This is the only option that allows you to bring your own separate lawsuit against Anthropic for the claims this Settlement resolves.”

Literary Hub has announced the forty fellows of the 2026 Periplus collective mentorship program for writers of color who live and work in the United States. Each fellow will be paired with an established writer who is a member of the collective and they will meet on a monthly basis “to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.” This is the collective’s sixth year running these fellowships and they chose their newest mentees from over five hundred applicants. 

The woman fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis yesterday has been identified as prize-winning poet Renee Nicole Good, the BBC reports. A mother of three, Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and won a prize from the Academy of American Poets for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” in 2020. Old Dominion University’s president, Brian Hemphill, wrote, “May Renee’s life be a reminder of what unites us: freedom, love, and peace.”

Tor Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan known for its genre fiction and prose titles, has announced the retirements of two executives: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-at-large, and Linda Quinton, publisher and VP of Forge Books, Publishers Weekly reports. Separately, Hayden and Quinton spent almost forty years at the company before ending their time there on January 5. Hayden is a three-time Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor, and Quinton led Forge Books, an imprint of Tor that focuses on both fiction and nonfiction, for nine years. 

With book distributor Baker & Taylor set for “imminent closure,” NPR considers the consequences for libraries nationwide. “For nearly two hundred years, Baker & Taylor has played a key role in getting books from manufacturers to warehouses to library patrons’ hands. Partnering with more than 5,000 U.S. libraries, the company has been a staple in the industry, selling books at wholesale prices and providing them with labels and lamination so libraries don’t have to.” Librarians report lags of weeks or months in receiving new titles as Baker & Taylor concludes its services and their libraries set up new accounts with other distributors.

OverDrive—a digital platform that furnishes e-books, audiobooks, and other digital media to public libraries—has responded to Washington, D.C.’s  proposed Library E-book Pricing Fairness Amendment Act of 2025, Publishers Marketplace reports. If enacted, the legislation would aim “to prohibit libraries from paying more to license an item than the public would and avoid limiting the number of licenses and loans the library can engage in” at a time when e-book licensing prices have surged. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash challenged the measure by citing the district’s reduced spending per patron even as e-book circulation has increased. 

On behalf of the Kurt Vonnegurt Estate and together with the ACLU, three authors and two anonymous high school students are challenging provisions of Utah House Bill 29, the 2024 law that prohibits materials deemed “pornographic or indecent” from public schools, Publishers Weekly reports. Jason M. Groth, legal director for ACLU of Utah, sees the ban as particularly insidious for the way it sets up a single ban to trigger a snowballing effect: “Just three school districts can trigger a statewide ban, ensuring more authors and more books are swept up. We are moving forward now with a strong case to protect the First Amendment rights of an impressive group of authors and students.”

Utah has added three new titles to its growing list of books prohibited in the state’s public schools, banning The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “The additions bring Utah’s total number of banned books to twenty-two.”

Publishers Weekly reports on supply-chain disruptions that have marred what was otherwise a strong holiday sales season at independent bookstores across the country. Many booksellers expressed frustration over “unexpected shipping delays of two weeks and more on shipments from Ingram, the Big Five, and other major publishers throughout December.” 

Kelly Jensen of Book Riot looks at a new YouGov poll released at the end of December 2025 that reveales American’s reading habits over the last year. The headline? Forty percent of Americans did not pick up a single book in 2025. “Perhaps that’s worth spinning in a more positive light. Most Americans, 60 percent, did read a book in 2025.” Other results of the survey show that those who identify as female read at higher rates, 63 percent, than male counterparts, and the age group that read the most books were those between 30 and 44.

Harlequin France, a division of HarperCollins, has started implementing AI translation tools, reports Literary Hub. According to a letter published on the French Literary Translators Association’s website in December, the publisher has contacted their translators to inform them that their contracts will be ending ASAP. Instead, Harlequin has employed Fluent Planet, a communications agency using machine translation software. A spokesperson from Fluent Planet stated that their hybrid model joins “in-house language assistance tools with systematic human translation carried out by professional literary translators,” such that “freelance proofreaders” will review the results of the machine translations.  

Kelvin Watson, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District (LVCCLD), has been named Library Journal’s 2026 Librarian of the Year. Starting this new role at LVCCLD in the spring of 2021, after COVID-19 shutdowns, and serving as the first full-time African American library director in the state of Nevada, Watson and his leadership has led to LVCCLD receiving numerous awards, such as the American Library Association (ALA)/Information Today, Inc. Library of the Future Award (from 2022-2024); the 2023 ALA Medal of Excellence Award; and the 2023 Urban Libraries Council Innovation Award for Anti-Racism, Digital Equity, and Inclusion, among others. Watson remarked that his basic principles of access, discovery, and delivery have remained consistent for him throughout the years. “Those three words have been with me, probably, my entire library career.” 

The American Library Association recently announced that a division of their organization, the Public Library Association (PLA), has launched the Transformative Technology Task Force “to advise...on the evolving role and impacts of transformative technology on library work and to identify and recommend priority training topics relevant to public library staff and users.” More specifically, the task force, which began work in November of last year, will be focusing on artificial intelligence for the first two years. PLA President Dr. Brandy McNeil remarks that the association “has assembled a powerhouse group to help shape how public libraries approach innovation, ethics, and the opportunities of an AI-powered world.” The task force consists of nine PLA members. 

Thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 entered the public domain on January 1, or Public Domain Day, according to Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Among the literary works that are now “free for all to copy, share, and build upon” are Agatha Christie’s The Murder at the Vicarage, T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness, and W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale. 

The New York Times takes a look at what drove the book business in 2025, a year when readers bought around 184 million print adult fiction books. In a nutshell, some of this year’s biggest books were genre novels, sales of romance titles are still rising, and the Bible is a best-seller. “One prediction that appears overblown is the idea that readers would fully adopt digital book formats, causing sales of print books to plummet the way sales of physical newspapers have. But people seem to like reading paper books, which make up roughly three-quarters of book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. At the same time, sales of e-books have shrunk, even after all but replacing the mass market paperback during the 2010s.”