Spoken, a new AI audiobook company based in Portland, Oregon, claims to offer a process that “deeply analyzes each manuscript and its characters to recommend or custom-generate the perfect voices. These voices—whether drawn from our AI voice actor catalog or crafted from character descriptions—are used to deliver single, dual, or full-cast narration that reflects your story’s tone, texture, and emotional depth.”

Jim Millot of Publishers Weekly reports on the decline in sales for Penguin Random House in the first half of 2025, citing rising costs and uncertainty over the tarrifs imposed by the Trump administration. “Revenue rose to €2.3 billion ($2.6 billion), but operating EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) fell 12 percent, to €255 million ($297.5 million),” Millot writes. “In his letter to employees, PRH global CEO Nihar Malaviya said rising costs were up ‘in nearly all areas of our business.’”

Japanese novelist Rie Qudan talks to John Self of the Guardian about her rationale for using ChatGPT to write her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which won the Akutagawa Prize last year and will be published by Simon & Schuster, in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, on September 2. Self writes, “Qudan said that part of it—5 percent was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation—was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also ‘gained a lot of inspiration’ for the novel through ‘exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways.’ Qudan’s use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects.”

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers shared a message on Popville in which she cancelled her appearance at the National Book Festival “due to current events in Washington, D.C.” Jeffers, whose most recent book is Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, published by Harper in June, was scheduled to appear in conversation with scholar Imani Perry. Jeffers went on to explain that “given all that’s happening, frankly, as an African American, I’m just afraid to be in that city.” The annual festival is scheduled for September 6 amid President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C.

The finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with eighteen books in three categories—fiction, nonfiction, and young reader’s literature—in contention for the annual awards. The winner in each category will receive $50,000. The finalists in fiction are The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Isola by Allegra Goodman, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, and Flesh by David Szalay. The winners will be announced on October 8.

Marking the first settlement in a string of lawsuits brought by authors and other copyright owners against large tech companies over their AI training, Reuters reports that artificial intelligence company Anthropic has resolved a class action lawsuit from a group of U.S. authors who argued that its AI training infringed their copyrights. The terms of the settlement have not yet been revealed. “The California federal judge overseeing the case said in a June ruling that Anthropic might have illegally downloaded as many as seven million books from pirate websites, which could have made it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors' case was successful.”

Publishers Weekly reports on the publishing industry’s sales estimates for 2024 from the Association of American Publishers. “Total sales rose 4.1 percent, to $32.5 billion, while unit sales increased 3.4 percent, to 3.1 billion,” Jim Millot writes. “The final 2024 numbers combine the $14.2 billion reported to the AAP by the 1,281 publishers who take part in the association’s monthly StatShot program as well $18.3 billion in estimated sales. The new figures show slightly slower growth than those released earlier this year, which only included reported revenue that showed a 6.5 percent sales increase.”

Simon & Schuster today announced that Jonathan Karp intends to step down from his role as CEO. Karp will remain with Simon & Schuster and will become the publisher of a new imprint, Simon Six. In order to ensure a smooth transition and continued focus on Simon & Schuster’s authors, Karp will continue to serve as CEO during the transition.  Karp was named CEO of Simon & Schuster in 2020, following ten years as publisher of the company’s flagship imprint. Prior to joining Simon & Schuster, he was the publisher, and editor in chief of Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group.

PEN America has received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its work on the freedom to read, with a heightened focus on supporting public libraries and librarians. “This gift will enable PEN America to extend its groundbreaking research and analysis, public awareness campaigns, and coalition building to include public libraries and librarians who are facing escalating threats to their work, safety and core mission,” PEN America writes.

Matt Enis of Library Journal writes about a new online hub designed for libraries that was launched earlier this summer by Amazon Business, a division of the online retailer. “The hub offers office supplies, IT equipment, furniture, facility maintenance products, and more, as well as a curated selection of print books available for individual purchase at discounts ranging from 30 to 40 percent.” The collections, including books in categories such as biographies and memoirs, literature and fiction, and nonfiction, are selected by Amazon editors based partly on top selling new and preorder titles, Enis writes, with Amazon editors evaluating collections “by taking into consideration lists that appeal to a broad audience and collections that help libraries optimize their ordering,” according to Amazon’s spokesperson.

C-SPAN has announced a new TV series that will feature “thought-provoking conversations with leading authors, policymakers, business innovators and cultural figures,” People magazine reports. Set to debut in the fall, America’s Book Club will be hosted by David Rubenstein, who will be joined by authors John Grisham, Walter Isaacson, Stacy Schiff, and David Grann as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Harvard University professor and historian Henry Louis Gates, and chef-restauranteur José Andrés, among others.

According to a report from the BBC, the organizers of the U.K.’s Polari Prize, which celebrates LGBTQ+ literature, have cancelled this year’s prize over objections from nominated authors, judges, and more than 800 people in the publishing industry to the inclusion on the longlist of author John Boyne, whose stance and statements on trans issues and women’s rights, they say, are “inappropriate and hurtful” and “incompatible with the LGBTQ+ community’s most basic standards of inclusion.” The organizers said they hoped the prize would return in 2026.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes about the future of book reviews in light of the Associated Press’s decision to no longer produce them. “If you subscribe to one of the few major newspapers with its own books coverage, you’ll be fine,” he writes. “But readers of papers across the country won’t see reviews syndicated from the AP after Aug. 31.”

The National Endowment for the Arts has cancelled its 2026 Creative Writing Fellowships program, Publishers Weekly reports. Writers who had applied were informed by e-mail that their applications were withdrawn and would not be reviewed.

Malcolm Margolin, the founder of the independent press Heyday, died on August 20, Publishers Weekly reports. The recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, Margolin led the Berkeley-based press for over forty years, during which time he built a reputation for commitment to regional authors and resistance to corporate conglomerates, registering the press as a nonprofit in 2001 to protect its longevity without acquisition by a larger publisher. In a 2015 interview on the occasion of his retirement, Margolin reflected on his life’s work with “pride and amazement at the hundreds of books we’ve published, the communities we’ve nourished, and the wealth of ideas we’ve put forth.” 

A new study shows that reading for pleasure has dropped by 40 percent in the United States, the Guardian reports. Collecting data over twenty years, researchers at the University of Florida and University College London found that between 2003 and 2023, daily reading in America, for reasons outside of work or study, fell by around 3 percent each year. Study coauthor Jill Sonke notes, “Our digital culture is certainly part of the story. But there are also structural issues—limited access to reading materials, economic insecurity, and a national decline in leisure time.” 

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has announced “an agency-wide reorganization to consolidate its grantmaking programs and divisions.” In a press release, the agency stated plans, effective immediately, to “merge the functions and staff of seven grantmaking offices and divisions into four new divisions to support projects that advance humanities research, education, public programs, infrastructure, and cultural preservation.” The news of this reorganization follows a June reduction in force (RIF) that eliminated two-thirds of the agency’s workforce.

Ahead of a September 1 deadline in a class action lawsuit against the AI company Anthropic, the Authors Guild is recommending authors share their contact information and book titles with the law firm representing writers’ interests in the matter, Publishers Weekly reports. An estimated seven million books are alleged to have been pirated for use in training Anthropic’s AI model, and the Authors Guild believes payouts may range from “$750 per title up to a maximum of $150,000 per title” if the lawsuit is successful. While authors do not need to take any action to be a member of the class, registering with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein will ensure that writers are apprised of developments with the lawsuit. The case is set to go to trial in December 2025.

Shira Perlmutter, the former register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office who is suing the federal government after the Trump administration fired her in May, has once more asked the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., to grant “an injunction pending appeal and to end Defendants’ lawless attempt to take over the Library of Congress,” Publishers Weekly reports. Perlmutter’s legal team is urging the court to see the connection between the Office of Copyright’s report on AI, which revealed “the copyright implications for training generative artificial intelligence models,” and Perlmutter’s subsequent dismissal.

A new effort at Riverhead Books will bring more Chinese language literature in translation to American readers, NPR reports. Led by editor Han Zhang, the initiative aims to circumvent systemics obstacles, “both real and imagined,” to “doing business with a country with a pretty intensive censorship structure in place” and offer translations that convey the richness and range of contemporary Chinese literature. The first book in Zhang’s program, Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was released last week. “I think, for a long time, the perception of Chinese literature among Western readers has been quite fixed,” says Yeuran. “It’s often seen as either heavily influenced by Chinese culture, or focused on people living rural, impoverished lives. Which has nothing to do with our lives today.” Other books in Zhang’s lineup include titles from Hong Kong and Taiwan.