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.”

While print book sales through early December were down 1 percent compared to the same period last year, according to Circana BookScan, digital audiobook sales remain a bright spot in the industry, sometimes outselling their hardcover counterparts, the Wall Street Journal reports. “Digital audiobook sales have been on a tear in recent years, and jumped by nearly 24 percent in 2024, to $1.1 billion, according to the Association of American Publishers. Their growth slowed this year, with a 1 percent increase through October, to nearly $888 million. ‘It’s the natural roller coaster of any product that does well,’ said veteran audiobook narrator Rich Miller. ‘I don’t think the run is over.’”

Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel The Women was among the most checked-out books in U.S. public libraries this year, NPR reports. “As it happens, books by women dominated most-borrowed library lists in 2025.... Three of the top ten titles for the country’s biggest public library system, in New York City, were part of a best-selling romantasy series by Rebecca Yarros: Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm.”

Earlier this week six authors filed new individual copyright infringement actions against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI, Publishers Weekly reports. “The suits, which were filed in the Northern District of California, states the companies copied authors' books from well-known pirate libraries—including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF—to train their large language models without permission, licensing, or compensation.” The six authors, including two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, opted out of the $1.5 billion settlement of the lawsuit against Anthropic. “The new filing states that the settlement, which would provide $3,000 to authors and/or publishers, is not enough.” Instead, the plaintiffs are seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, or a total of $900,000 per work.

HarperCollins has cut ties with children’s book author David Walliams, and he has been dropped from the Waterstones children’s book festival, following “allegations of inappropriate behavior towards young women” and “junior female staff” at HarperCollins UK, the Guardian reports. “One woman who raised concerns is understood to have left the company after reaching a settlement that included a five-figure payout. After the investigation, the publisher decided it would no longer release new titles by the author.” Walliams has denied the allegations.

Barnes & Noble plans to open sixty new locations across the United States in 2026, USA Today reports. “While the details are still ‘being worked out’ as far as locations and grand opening dates, the expansion follows a period of ‘strong sales’ in existing stores, Barnes & Noble confirmed.”

Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker about the slow struggle of the dictionary, once a staple of every household, in the age of the internet. A new book, Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary (Atlantic Monthly Press), serves as “a good-natured and sympathetic account of what seems to be a losing struggle,” he writes. “Fatsis concludes, a little reluctantly, not only that the dictionary may be on its last legs as a commercial enterprise but that lexicographical expertise is expiring with it. He cites an estimate that, twenty-five years ago, there were two hundred full-time lexicographers in the U.S. Today, he thinks that the number is ‘probably closer to thirty.’”

The U.S. Senate has confirmed Mary Anne Carter as the Chairman of the National Endowments of the Arts (NEA), according to a press release from the organization. Carter serves as the 14th leader of the NEA, returning to the role after leading the organization during the first Trump presidential term. “The arts are essential to creating, innovating, healing, and recovery, and they provide vital economic stability to communities across the nation,” said Carter in a statement on her appointment. “I look forward to the many celebrations that will take place in 2026 in honor of America’s 250th anniversary, as well as to the agency’s continued research into the powerful role the arts play in healing—from illness to trauma to natural disasters.” 

The Unterberg Poetry Center of New York City’s 92nd Street Y has digitized hundreds of audio recordings from its decades of events with literary luminaries, giving today’s listeners “a glimpse into history and a taste of what the writers themselves were like in public,” the New York Times reports. The recordings, the earliest of which date to 1949, include audio from events with Isaac Asimov, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Anaïs Min, and more, capturing authors’ tics, nerves, and charm. “Tom Wolfe was a fast talker. Eudora Welty had a musical Southern drawl. Kurt Vonnegut’s jokes got belly laughs.”

Conservative public interest law firm America First Legal filed a federal civil rights complaint against Penguin Random House (PRH) on December 16 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission demanding there be an investigation into “apparent race- and sex-based discrimination in its hiring, promotion, and workforce development practices,” Publishers Weekly reports. PRH is the latest company to be targeted by the law firm, following Nike, Disney, and Mattel for their DEI policies. A spokesperson for PRH stated, “We are proud of our talented team of professionals and are confident that our employment practices comply with all applicable laws.”