James Hill writes for the New York Times about the Parisian Atelier Devauchelle, where bookbinding is a communal art. The women who run the atelier sew and create new bindings, restore torn pages of books, and create slipcovers and special boxes to conserve fragile editions. The workshop is located near Drouot, an auction house that sells antiquarian books.

The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) has announced the 2025 CLMP Firecracker Awards—annual prizes that celebrate the work of independent literary publishers. Obligations to the Wounded (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024) by Mubanga Kalimamukwento won the prize in fiction, Low: Notes on Art & Trash (Fonograf Editions, 2024) by Jaydra Johnson won the prize in creative nonfiction, and Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024) by Don Mee Choi won the prize in poetry. Each winner in the book categories receives $2,000 to be split evenly between the press and the author. Revel, a biannual magazine based in Atlanta, won the award for best debut magazine, and Circumference, a biannual journal founded in 2020, won the award for general excellence in magazines. Each winner in the magazine categories receive $1,000.

Alex Reisner writes for the Atlantic about how tech companies developing LLMs pose “an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere.” Reisner writes that chatbots “have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations...by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers,” and cites one study that found Google’s AI overviews have reduced traffic to outside websites by more than 34 percent.

Though bookseller James Daunt has received widespread praise for rehabilitating Barnes & Noble (B&N) since he was named CEO in 2019, many independent publishers are frustrated with how little attention B&N has paid to their lists, Publishers Weekly reports. Nearly every one of the dozen independent presses Publishers Weekly interviewed said that their business with B&N has dropped significantly since Daunt took over, though all the indies emphasized they are glad B&N is in business. As one nonfiction publisher said, “Daunt’s entitled to running his business as he sees fit. Opening more stores is good. Sales being up is good. What he is doing is working—it’s just not working for us.”

A group of authors including Jonathan Alter, Mary Bly, and Jia Tolentino has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, arguing that the tech company used the Books3 pirate database of almost 200,000 books to train its LLM, and knowingly infringed on copyrighted material, Publishers Lunch reports.

Jenny Singer writes for the Washington Post about the BookTok phenomenon of the “book boyfriend,” as romance book sales continue to soar. The term refers to characters “who seem to have stridden, galloped, or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader’s deepest desires,” Singer writes. “Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can’t stop thinking about—and longing for—beyond the page.” Singer notes the history of idealized and problematic book boyfriends, adding that the trend even existed in 1848 when “a literary magazine reported that ‘New England states were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the Jane Eyre fever.’”

In Bartz v. Anthropic, a federal judge in California has ruled that AI training constitutes fair use when using legally acquired copyrighted books but violates copyright law when downloading pirated copies for permanent storage, Publishers Weekly reports. In a statement responding to the ruling, the Authors Guild said: “While the Authors Guild is relieved that the court recognized Anthropic’s massive, criminal-level, unexcused e-book piracy for what it is, the decision that using pirated or scanned books for training LLMs is fair use” contradicts copyright law and “ignores the harm caused to authors and the value of their works due to market saturation by LLM-generated content that competes with human authors.”

In the Poets on Translation series in Poetry, Heather Green writes about translating the work of Tristan Tzara and “using new sounds to root a poem in a partially shared soil of linguistic meaning.”

Meg LaBorde Kuehn, the publisher and CEO of Kirkus Reviews, is leaving the company, effective July 11, Shelf Awareness reports. Judy Hottensen, who stepped down as vice president and associate publisher of Grove/Atlantic on January 1, will serve as interim CEO.

To celebrate the centennial of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald scholars and fans joined a boat tour around Manhasset Bay that shows how little the place has changed since 1925, the New York Times reports.

A Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv on June 17 destroyed Ukrainian Priority Publishing, a Ukrainian publishing house, Publishers Weekly reports. The attack, which killed twenty-eight people, came just after the thirteenth International Book Arsenal Festival was held in Kyiv. The literary festival attracted thirty thousand attendees, including over a hundred publishers and six bookstores.

Digital audiobook sales, which have been the primary driver of sales since Spotify entered the market in November 2023, sank in April, Publishers Weekly reports. Total revenue across 1,325 publishers saw a 4 percent overall decline compared to April 2024 due, in part, to a 12.5 percent drop in digital audiobook sales across both the adult and children’s/YA categories. Adult trade fiction digital audio sales dropped 9 percent in April, and adult nonfiction digital audio sales dropped 17.6 percent.

Citing the recently published book Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship (Amistad, 2025) by Dana A. Williams, Clint Smith writes for the Atlantic about how Toni Morrison transformed publishing as an editor at Random House. Smith writes: “How Morrison handled the pressures of wielding her one-of-a-kind influence is fascinating—and, in retrospect, telling: As an editor, she was not just tenacious, but also always aware of how tenuous progress in the field could be…. Morrison’s mode was to be relentlessly demanding—of herself, her authors, and her Random House colleagues. She tailored her rigorous style to the varied array of Black writers she didn’t hesitate to pitch to her bosses.”

A new prize for translated poetry has been launched by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Giramondo Publishing, and New Directions, the Guardian reports. The biennial Poetry in Translation Prize will award an advance of $5,000 to be shared equally between the poet and translator. The winning collection will be published in the U.K. and Ireland by Fitzcarraldo Editions, in Australia and New Zealand by Giramondo, and in North America by New Directions. Submissions are open from July 15 to August 15 to poets writing in any language other than English. The winner will be announced in January 2026 and publication of the winning collection is scheduled for 2027.

NetGalley has launched a consumer marketing platform called Booktrovert, Publishers Weekly reports. Booktrovert will offer e-book giveaways, reader activities, promotional and preorder campaigns, purchase links, and more. The platform will target general readers as opposed to industry professionals. Publishers will be able to create campaigns through a self-service interface within their NetGalley accounts and receive customer analytics and demographic data.

Authors are posting videos of themselves editing their manuscripts on TikTok to refute allegations that they are using generative AI and to bring readers into the drafting process, Alana Yzola reports for Wired. “The publishing market is expected to grow by $18.9 million between now and 2029, according to market research firm Technavio, partially due to an influx of self-published authors,” Yzola writes. “But with scammy rewrites and digitally fabricated authors entering the market, artificial intelligence has made searching for human-made content more difficult, causing independent authors to combat what some are calling an AI-generated ‘witch hunt.’”

BookTok has had multiple controversies in the last month: accusations of plagiarism, AI use, and author bullying, NBC News reports. Beverly, a romance novel by author Laura J. Robert, had been gaining traction on BookTok, but many content creators removed their positive endorsements of the book after allegations that Robert had plagiarized R.J. Lewis’s 2016 title, Obsessed. The author Victoria Aveyard recently posted a video alluding to another author using generative AI in a novel but did not name the writer. And Author Ali Hazelwood was cyberbullied after making a comment about who Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist of the Hunger Games series, should have ended up with romantically.

Five years after it was discontinued along with the industry trade show BookExpo, BookCon will return to New York City’s Javits Center next April, according to ReedPop, a boutique arm of events organizer Reed Exhibitions. Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports that Jenny Martin, “who headed up the earlier iteration of BookCon as well as BookExpo,” will serve as event director. Milliot writes: “Martin stressed that the revived event will bear no resemblance to BookExpo, an industry trade show, saying that the BookCon team is ‘focused wholly on delivering a consumer event.’”

PEN America has compiled “A Travel Ban Reading List” that includes more than fifty titles “by authors with ties to the 19 countries affected by President Trump’s travel ban.” Sabir Sultan, director of the World Voices Festival and Literary Programs at PEN America, writes, “Writers record their ideas, their fantasies, and mirror our collective realities. Through engaging with books we learn about ourselves and the world. We see clearer the complex tapestry of people, histories, and national borders that shape our daily lives. We are inspired to see new possibilities. Let this list inspire you to read and explore.”

A book publisher that was launched in 2023 to take advantage of the success of #BookTok, appears to be closing, the Bookseller reports. 8th Note Press, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, had acquired the rights to more than thirty novels and also announced a print publishing arm in partnership with Zando, the independent publishing company that recently acquired Tin House. However, Matilda Battersby of the Bookseller writes, “[A]uthors and agents are currently negotiating the return of rights to titles acquired by the publisher, and the business’ digital presence has apparently been quietly deleted.”