Ed Nawotka writes for Publishers Weekly about how emerging tech can help the publishing industry as it advocates for AI licensing frameworks to protect authors. For example, the new firm Valent has developed technology to identify when and how much copyrighted material has been used to train an AI model. Louis Hunt, the cofounder and CEO of Valent, explains that Valent also has algorithms that can quantify how certain data could improve an AI model’s performance, which would give copyright holders leverage in licensing negotiations.

The Guardian reports on a new wave of literary parties in the U.K. that feature poetry performances and DJ sets. The Soho Reading series began in the summer of 2023 when Tom Willis, a writer and PhD student, wanted to create a social scene with “literature as the center.” Other literary event series that draw a similarly diverse crowd include New Work, hosted by writers Rachel Connolly and Isis O’Regan, and the popular live readings of The Toe Rag, a London-based quarterly DIY arts and culture newspaper.

Supreme court justices are considering certain picture books with LGBTQ+ themes after parents in Maryland claimed they have a religious right to withdraw their children from classes on days that stories with gay and transgender themes are discussed, the New York Times reports.

The District Court of Rhode Island held a motion hearing on April 18 in an effort to preserve the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Minority Business and Development Agency, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Publishers Weekly reports. The lawsuit, which was filed by twenty-one attorneys general, seeks to restore funding to the agencies and avoid threats to grants that have already been awarded.

Author Neil Gaiman is seeking more than $500,000 from Caroline Wallner, one of the women who has come forward accusing him of sexual misconduct, New York magazine reports. Gaiman, who denies abusing Wallner, has filed a demand for arbitration, accusing Wallner of breaching the NDA she signed when she shared her story with the media.

Clare Mulroy writes for USA Today about the silent book clubs proliferating around the U.S. Though the name is a bit misleading, silent book clubs do not require participants to read the same book. Readers arrive to quietly read with other people. “The trend reflects a growing post-pandemic need to connect in person while also being mindful of social batteries,” Mulroy writes, adding that “Eventbrite shows a 223 percent increase in silent book club events from 2023 to 2024, especially in cities like Chicago, Indianapolis, New York City, Seattle, and Atlanta.”

The winners of the annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which celebrate LGBTQ+ literary excellence, were announced at the New School Thursday. The list of winners includes Blas Falconer, who won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for Rara Avis (Four Way Books) and Cass Donish, who won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for Your Dazzling Death (Knopf). Jiaming Tang won both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Cinema Love (Dutton).

The ACLU of Tennessee filed a lawsuit on April 16 to stop book bans in Rutherford County, Publishers Weekly reports. In the past year, the Rutherford County Board of Education has removed or restricted more than 140 titles from school libraries. The lawsuit argues that book bans are a direct violation of students’ First Amendment rights.

Three hundred people in Chelsea, Michigan, formed a human chain to move thousands of books from the old location of Serendipity Books to its new site, the Washington Post reports. Bookstore owner Michelle Tuplin said she had the idea to create a “book brigade,” but did not expect so many community members to show up. The group relocated 9,100 books in under two hours and a video of the event has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on TikTok. The new Serendipity Books will open on April 26, which is also Independent Bookstore Day.

The New York Public Library has announced the finalists for the 2025 Young Lions Fiction Award: ‘Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton), Eliza Barry Callahan for The Hearing Test (Catapult), Alexander Sammartino for Last Acts (Scribner), Santiago Jose Sanchez for Hombrecito (Riverhead), and Karla Cornejo Villavicencio for Catalina (One World). A panel of judges will select the winner of this year’s $10,000 prize, which will be announced during a ceremony on June 12 at 7 PM EDT.

Alexandra Alter writes for the New York Times about the ethical quandaries of publishing Joan Didion’s journal entries about therapy, as they appear are in Notes to John, forthcoming from Knopf on April 22. The posthumous work collects journal entries she wrote after sessions with a psychiatrist, during which she discussed subjects such as alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and her complex relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The notes are sometimes addressed only to her husband, John Gregory Dunne, another factor that has sparked some fans and friends of Didion to wonder if the publication is invasive. “Didion was famously guarded,” Alter writes, but she was also “a meticulous note taker and record keeper who was savvy about the publishing industry; she likely knew that any literary documents she left behind could be released.”

Staffers at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) are outraged over the Trump administration’s gutting and restructuring of the agency, Publishers Weekly reports. Only twelve employees of the original seventy-five remain—one of whom is Lisa Solomson, who is serving as acting deputy director of library services. Solomson is married to Matthew H. Solomson, a federal judge appointed by Trump during his first term. The remaining personnel do not have the capacity to distribute all existing grants or process incoming applications for funding, according to employees on leave from the agency and familiar with IMLS operations.

DOGE has taken over the federal grants website, Grants.gov, the NonProfit Times reports. DOGE staffers will now be able to review grant proposals and make decisions about distributing funds, according to the Washington Post.

Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt discusses rejuvenating the bookstore’s brand with CNN. He also discusses curating the collection of books in each store, the personal touches in every branch, and how the younger generation of readers continues to be drawn to classic novels in addition to books of the moment (for instance, romantasy titles).

Keziah Weir writes for Vanity Fair about how Meta AI staffers concluded that more than seven million books have no “economic value.” Meta, which used millions of pirated books to train its AI, is arguing that the company’s use of copyrighted materials falls under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” The Association of American Publishers has rejected this claim, stating in an amicus brief filed last week, “There is nothing transformative about the systematic copying and encoding of textual works, word by word, into an LLM. It does not involve criticism or commentary, provision of a search or indexing utility, software interoperability, or any other purpose recognized as transformative under fair use precedents.” Meta also claimed that the company does not see the point in compensating authors to license their books because “for there to be a market, there must be something of value to exchange, but none of Plaintiffs works has economic value, individually, as training data.”

Book subscription services, which curate books for readers, are starting to publish their own titles, Rhys Thomas reports for the Guardian. FairyLoot, a U.K. fantasy subscription box, announced a partnership with Transworld, a division of Penguin Random House in January, and last week, OwlCrate, a subscription service based in Canada, launched OwlCrate Press. Thomas writes that these services have “a guaranteed customer base, a strong sense of the titles that work for them, and the ability to create exclusive editions,” adding, “It’s a pretty powerful sales pitch to any bidding writer.”

With the off Broadway debut of his 1958 play The Swamp Dwellers, Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, reflects on his younger, more optimistic self in the New York Times. Now ninety years old, Soyinka revisits The Swamp Dwellers, which he wrote when he was twenty-four, two years before Nigeria’s independence. “That play now makes me recollect very vividly that eve of independence season when we were all gung-ho about the emergence of a unified society,” he says, adding, “I’ve lost that sense of achievable idealism.” But, he continues, “One never loses a picture, a projection of what you think your society can be. That’s what hurts.”

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced the 2025 Guggenheim fellows, which also marks the hundredth anniversary of the fellowship program. The grantees include Cynthia Cruz, francine j. harris, Richie Hofmann, Brandon D. Som, and others in Poetry; Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Miranda July, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Lethem, and others in Fiction; and Sloane Crosley, Harold Holzer, Kristen Radtke, and Nathaniel Rich, among others in General Nonfiction.

Seven Stories Press has acquired Two Dollar Radio, Publishers Weekly reports. Two Dollar Radio, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has approximately eighty titles in print, and is the fourth imprint of Seven Stories, which is based in New York City. Dan Simon, the publisher of Seven Stories, said both presses “are kind of alternative in the best sense: We’re not part of the club.” Eric Obenauf will remain in his role as publisher and editorial director of Two Dollar Radio.

The Association of American Publishers filed an amicus brief on April 11 arguing that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its AI model fails to meet fair use standards, Publishers Weekly reports. The brief supports authors in their class action lawsuit against Meta and further dismisses the tech company’s claims that licensing options for that content was unavailable, stating, “the existence of an active market for AI training materials is indisputable.”