Nearly a million books in 254 languages from Harvard University’s library and troves of old newspapers and materials held by the Boston Public Library are being released to tech companies for AI training, the Associated Press reports. Jessica Chapel, the chief of digital and online services at the Boston Public Library, said, “OpenAI had this interest in massive amounts of training data. We have an interest in massive amounts of digital objects. So this is kind of just a case that things are aligning.” Digitizing is expensive, and tech companies can essentially fund projects librarians want to pursue anyway while benefiting from scores of valuable data.

Yael van der Wouden has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Safekeep (Penguin, 2024), the Guardian reports. The nonfiction award went to Rachel Clarke’s The Story of a Heart: Two Families, One Heart, and the Medical Miracle That Saved a Child’s Life (Little, Brown, 2024). Each author received £30,000 (approximately $40,742).

Parul Sehgal writes for the New York Times about biography and how the genre might withstand the threats AI poses to the literary world. “Where biography is a form built on the vagaries of human experience,” Sehgal writes, “artificial intelligence offers a form of knowledge stripped of experience.” She adds: “Even the boosters of AI readily concede its poor grasp of character or human motive, which is notoriously coiled, cloudy, contradictory. To understand motive requires some sense of the raw matter of experience, of its quiddity, of the body’s way of knowing and remembering.”

The literary journal Lapham’s Quarterly is now attached to Bard College and will begin its revival with a website and podcast, Alexandra Alter reports for the New York Times. The journal is relaunching its digital presence and audio content under the editorial direction of writers Donovan Hohn and Francine Prose. Lewis Lapham, who founded the journal in 2007, died in 2024. Toward the end of his life, it was unclear if the journal would survive him—the journal was struggling financially, furloughed its staff, and stopped publishing issues. Lapham’s Quarterly’s “survival is all the more remarkable at a time when many literary journals are struggling,” Alter writes, especially due to new funding challenges presented by the Trump administration’s budget cuts to the NEA.

Danielle Ofri writes for the New Yorker about why doctors write, and explores the history, ethics, and motivations of doctor-writing. Though physicians “write all day, every day—progress notes, consultations, assessments, referrals, appeal letters,” Ofri explains, “We write at a remove, cordoning off our inner world behind a cool clinical eye and protective professional jargon.” She adds: “Doctoring provides powerful tools for getting under the hood, but writing offers ones that dig into the interstitial spaces where our more utilitarian tools falter. And this might reveal an even deeper aspect to writing—an element of purely being human.”

The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is celebrating its hundredth anniversary at a moment when Black history is under attack, the New York Times reports. The Schomburg Centennial Festival will take place on June 14, feature various literary and cultural events, and culminate with an outdoor block party and a performance by Slick Rick. The anniversary comes as the Trump Administration continues to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and decimate federal funding for libraries, museums, and arts organizations in service of what Trump calls patriotic history.

The twelve board members of the Fulbright program have resigned after accusing Trump aides of political interference, the New York Times reports. The board members expressed concern that new appointees at the State Department, which manages the scholarship program, took illegal action by canceling awards to nearly two hundred American professors and researchers.

Everand, the online e-book and audiobook subscription service subsidiary of Scribd, has acquired the online book club platform Fable, Publishers Weekly reports. All Fable employees will join Scribd, with Tony Grimminck, CEO of Scribd, taking over as the CEO of Fable, and Padmasree Warrior, Fable’s founder, moving into an advisory role.

Elisa Gabbert writes for the New York Times about the joy of reading one poem in many different translations. Gabbert writes, “I love to see how different minds find (hugely or minutely) different solutions to the same set of problems.”

Children’s reading enjoyment in the U.K. has fallen to the lowest recorded level in two decades, the Guardian reports. The decline is particularly evident in teenage boys. Of girls aged eight to eighteen, 39.1 percent said they enjoyed reading in their free time, compared to 25.7 percent of boys. Only one in three children aged eight to eighteen reported enjoying reading “very much” or “quite a lot” this year. The number of children that reported reading something daily in their free time has halved in the last twenty years, from 38.1 percent to 18.7 percent.

Conduit Books & Ephemera, which was founded in 1993, is pursuing legal action against Conduit, a new press “focusing initially on male authors,” for infringing upon their trademarked name.

A federal judge has denied a preliminary injunction in American Library Association v. Sonderling, a lawsuit that seeks to stop the destruction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Publishers Weekly reports. The court’s decision rested on an interpretation of the case that prioritized contractual issues over constitutional ones.

Lambda Literary, the nation’s leading organization championing LGBTQ+ literature, has named Jozie (J. Clapp) Clapp as its new executive director. The former executive director of the LGBTQ Center of Durham in North Carolina, J. Clapp has worked in leadership positions for over a decade in nonprofits, fundraising and advocating for LGBTQ+ communities, especially BIPOC and transgender individuals. J. Clapp said, “It’s an incredible honor to lead this next chapter, ensuring LGBTQ+ literature continues to thrive and reflect our rich, diverse communities.”

Pauline McLean writes for the BBC about the Victorian bookbinders who used arsenic, as well as mercury and chrome, to make striking green covers for books. Prolonged exposure to these books, which are stored in archives around the world, can cause low-level arsenic poisoning. The Poison Book Project, a collaboration in Delaware between the Winterthur Museum and the state university, compiled a list of titles that could harm humans. Inspired by this initiative, Erica Kotze, a preservative conservator at the University of St. Andrews, and Pilar Gil, a biochemist, developed a technology to examine thousands of historic books. The affordable testing device is designed to flash red when detecting toxic elements. The device will allow librarians and conservators to identify toxic books, safely store them, and still enjoy controlled access.

Carla Hayden, the former Librarian of Congress, speaks out about her dismissal by Trump with CBS News. When reflecting on the efforts of the Trump administration to push out leaders and enforce budget cuts at cultural institutions, she says, “it’s part of a larger-seeming effort to diminish opportunities for the general public to have free access to information and inspiration.” She adds: “We like to say as librarians, ‘Free people read freely.’ And so, there’s been an effort recently to quelch that.”

Sam Dolnick writes for the New York Times about the author James Frey and his relationship to art, truth, and public shaming after the scandal that followed the fabrication of some facts in his memoir A Million Little Pieces (Doubleday, 2003). Frey says he was “working in autofiction before that word existed.” This month he is publishing a novel called Next to Heaven (Authors Equity) about a swingers party and a murder.

Salman Rushdie said he has moved on from the knife attack that threatened his life in 2022, the BBC reports. At this year’s Hay Festival in Wales, Rushdie said, “It will be nice to talk about fiction again because ever since the attack, really the only thing anybody’s wanted to talk about is the attack, but I’m over it.” When asked about AI’s impact on authors, Rushdie said, “I don’t have Chat GPT,” adding, “I try very hard to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

Librarians, teachers, bookstore owners, and other activists have planned a day of action on June 7 to fight book bans and preserve history, USA Today reports. Teach Truth Day of Action will include around a hundred events across the country, such as film screenings, protest marches, and community readings.

Due to soft sales and diminished funding, the New Press has reduced its number of employees by about nine—from a staff of under thirty members to one of under twenty, Publishers Weekly reports. Cofounder and executive director Diane Wachtell said she attributed the decline in sales to the increased banning of mostly progressive books under Trump’s administration, and a lack of a sales uptick for books that explain what is happening in the United States today. “It looks like, at least for now, readers are turning to escapist books rather than to books that try to explain what is happening,” she said.

Book of the Month Club (BOMC), which chose James Frey’s novel Next to Heaven (Authors Equity, 2025) as an upcoming selection, has responded to criticism about Frey’s prior comments on AI, Publishers Lunch reports. In a 2023 interview, Frey said that he was using generative AI in the writing of his work. BOMC has addressed the controversy, writing, “it is our belief that in today’s technology environment, there is always a chance that sentences or grammar were edited or revised with the use of AI tools somewhere in the creation process,” and added that the “use of AI is a complex and evolving topic in the publishing industry, and we’re monitoring it closely.” BOMC decided not to revoke the selection and instead encouraged members to make their own decisions about whether to read Frey’s novel.