Daily News

Library Journal shares details from Clarivate’s annual “Pulse of the Library” report that shows “a growing number of libraries are exploring or implementing artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025 (67 percent, compared with 63 percent in 2024), although the majority are in the earliest evaluation stages.” The report, based on a survey of 2,032 librarians from 109 countries representing academic, public, and national libraries, “also notes that there is a wide variation between academic and public libraries with AI adoption.”

Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, laid off thirteen staff members this week, bringing the total number of layoffs to thirty-one in the past few months, KOIN 6 News reports. “As with many businesses right now, we’re seeing expenses rise faster than sales,” a Powell’s spokesperson is quoted as saying.

In an essay for the Rumpus, Sean Cho A. writes about the experience of teaching college students during the rise of artificial intelligence. “A chatbot can generate lecture slides with more efficient scaffolding than I ever will. A bot can sort discussion board posts by keyword or sentiment. But bots will never notice the shift in someone’s voice when they say ‘home’ versus when they say ‘mother.’ It will never register the second eye-roll, the one meant not for disdain but for solidarity. It will never mishear ‘Homeric’ as ‘homely’ and accidentally create an entire week’s worth of discussion about what makes a hero.”

More than three hundred writers, scholars, and public figures, including past contributors to the newspaper, have refused to write for the New York Times Opinion section in a collective effort “to hold the paper accountable for its role in the genocide in Gaza,” according to the Wire. Among the signatories of the public statement are authors Sally Rooney, Kiese Laymon, Catherine Lacey, Kaveh Akbar, Mosab Abu Toha, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jia Tolentino, and Omar El Akkad.

The United States has revoked Nobel Prize–winning author Wole Soyinka’s U.S. visa, Reuters reports.  On Tuesday the author shared a letter from the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos requesting that he “bring his passport for physical cancellation of the visa.” Soyinka, 91, said in 2016 “that he had torn up his U.S. green card and renounced his American residency in protest at the first election of President Donald Trump.”

OpenAI’s motion to dismiss a consolidated class action suit over ChatGPT has been denied by a distric court judge in New York, Publishers Lunch reports. “The suit combines lawsuits from authors including Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Sarah Silverman, Kai Bird, and Victor LaValle, as well as the Authors Guild, alleging that ChatGPT’s outputs are similar to the authors’ work and constitute copyright infringement.” In denying OpenAI’s motion, the judge determined that the plaintiffs’ argument “is strong enough to go to trial.”

A coalition of seven charitable foundations—the Ford Foundation, Hawthornden Foundation, Lannan Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Poetry Foundation, and an anonymous foundation—today announced the launch of the Literary Arts Fund, an effort to “dramatically boost the essential yet critically underfunded nonprofit literary arts field in the United States,” according to a press release from the Mellon Foundation. “The fund, initiated by Mellon as a collaborative effort in service of the field’s needs and promise, will distribute at least $50 million over the next five years, with continued fundraising planned.” The Literary Arts Fund will award grants to U.S. literary nonprofit organizations and publishers that support contemporary writers of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or hybrid literary forms through an annual open call beginning November 10. Full guidelines and eligibility details are available at literaryartsfund.org.

A cache of recently-discovered letters by W. H. Auden reveals how the English poet “developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the...author’s home and was put on trial,” the Guardian reports. A hundred letters spanning roughly a decade between the early 1960s and 1970s “are written in enthusiastically colloquial—if frequently misspelt and agrammatical—German” to the man “he affectionally called ‘Hugerl’ in the posthumously published poem ‘Glad.’”

HarperCollins is building a 1.6 million-square-foot “supply chain logistics facility” in Brownsburg, Indiana, according to Publishers Weekly. “Once completed, the site will have the capacity to ship more than 300 million books annually to more than 100 countries around the world, according to the publisher, and is expected to create more than 400 supply chain logistics jobs.”

A district court judge in Texas “has again ruled that Texas’s ‘READER Act,’ which would require booksellers to rate every book they sell to public school libraries based on vague notions of ‘sexually explicit material,’ is unconstitutional,” according to Publishers Lunch. reports. He issued a permanent injunction against the law.

Kyle Chayka writes in the New Yorker about coming to rely on TextEdit, the simple writing app found on Macs, as other apps and software becomes increasingly complicated and, more to the point, connected to the Internet. “TextEdit is not connected to the internet, like Google Docs. It is not part of a larger suite of workplace software, like Microsoft Word. You can write in TextEdit, and you can format your writing with a bare minimum of fonts and styling,” Chayka writes. “I trust in TextEdit. It doesn’t redesign its interface without warning, the way Spotify does; it doesn’t hawk new features, and it doesn’t demand I update the app every other week, as Google Chrome does.”

On Monday a federal judge ordered the Department of Defense to return books about gender and race that had been removed from five school libraries on military bases after Trump’s earlier executive orders prohibiting materials that promote “gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology,” NPR reports. “In April, 12 students at schools on military bases in Virginia, Kentucky, Italy and Japan claimed their First Amendment rights had been violated when nearly 600 books were removed from the Department of Defense Education Activity schools they attend. The students are the children of active duty service members ranging from pre-K to 11th grade.” The American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Kentucky, and the ACLU of Virginia filed a motion on behalf of the families requesting the return of the books.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware alerts readers to “the tidal wave of AI-driven marketing scams from Nigeria that has swept over the writing world in the past year or so.”

Oprah Winfrey has chosen Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief as her latest book club pick, the Associated Press reports. The novel, Majumdar’s second, is already a finalist for a National Book Award and a Kirkus Prize. 

Spotify Audiobooks is launching Spotify Audiobook Selects, a program that will publish audiobooks by self-published authors, with the first list of sixteen audiobooks set for release on November 4. “This program is a key part of our overall mission to uplift new voices, giving more creators the opportunity to live off their art. By producing and distributing these titles, we’re connecting talented independent authors with listeners around the world.”

Emmy Award-winning actor, comedian and author Jeff Hiller will host this year’s National Book Awards ceremony on November 19, alongside musical guest Corinne Bailey Rae, according to People magazine. “I am thrilled to celebrate the literary world’s biggest night by hosting the National Book Awards—where I will meet these authors in person and embarrass myself by weeping from the excitement,” Hiller is quoted as saying.

A new company in the UK has launched an initiative “verify and label human-written works” amid the wave of AI-generated content, the Guardian reports. Books By People has launched an “Organic Literature” certification, with plans to place Organic Literature stamps “on books written by humans, with only limited AI use permitted for tasks such as formatting or idea generation.”

Sales of adult trade titles fell 13.6 percent in July compared to the same month last year, Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly reports. According to the Association of American Publishers’ StatShot program, fiction was down 10.3 percent, while sales of adult nonfiction titles declined 18.4 percent. “In fiction, trade paperbacks had the biggest drop, down 13 percent,” Milliot writes, “while digital audio had the largest decline since Spotify joined the industry, falling 12.7 percent.”

Christopher Merrill, the longtime director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, has announced he is stepping down after twenty-five years in the position. The announcement comes eight months after the U.S. Department of State terminated its 58-year partnership with the program, although Merrill says his decision predates that news.

Madeleine Connors of the Los Angeles Times writes about the Fleuria Audiobook Walking Club, a growing group of strangers who meet in Hermosa Beach to walk silently while listening to audiobooks and then discuss their reads. “The event is akin to a silent disco for readers. Audiobook enthusiasts convene for coffee and conversation before walking alongside the beach, listening to their audiobooks, and sharing endorsements as they go. They don’t all read the same books, but it doesn’t matter.”

A new collection of poems by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney contains a selection of verse never before seen in book form, including poems that “originally appeared in newspapers, journals and magazines under different pen names” and other previously unpublished poems housed in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, “where the poet bequeathed his works before his death in 2013,” the BBC reports. The Poems of Seamus Heaney was recently published in the U.K. by Faber and is forthcoming in November from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Erin Somers of Publisher Lunch reports on the “chaos” at Baker & Taylor, the book distributor that earlier this week announced it would close following the cancellation of its acquisition by ReaderLink. “Staffers, even those in supervisory positions, report that they do not have any information about what the ‘wind down’ of the company will look like. It is unclear whether books are still shipping to accounts, whether customers will get refunds, or whether books will be returned to publishers. Employees also don’t have language or information to relay to their customers,” Somers writes. Ingram, meanwhile, is “rolling out a new cataloging and processing system” to help onboard new customers. 

The Swedish Academy today announced that it had awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature to Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” His most recent book published in English is Herscht 17769 (New Directions, 2024), translated by Ottilie Mulzetan, an experimental novel written in a single continuous sentence about a character named Florian Herscht who attempts to warn Chancellor Angela Merkel about the world’s impending destruction.

Scarlett Pavlovich’s sexual assault lawsuit against Neil Gaiman has been dismissed by a Wisconsin federal judge, Vulture reports. “The judge did not rule on the facts of the case, but rather that the suit should have been filed in New Zealand and not Wisconsin.” Pavlovich has accused the author “of assaulting her while she worked as the nanny to his and then-wife Amanda Palmer’s child” at Palmer’s home on Waiheke Island. Palmer had filed for divorce from Gaiman in 2022, two years before Pavlovich and other women accused Gaiman of sexual misconduct and assault. Pavlovich “filed on human-trafficking charges under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, choosing Wisconsin as the venue for the suit because Gaiman has a residence there.”

Library distributor Baker & Taylor (B&T), the acquistion of which by ReaderLink was recently canceled, is shutting down, Publishers Weekly reports. “As a result, B&T let go about 520 employees yesterday and plans to wind down the business by January. Employees who were laid off had their severance plans canceled as well. B&T had undergone some layoffs earlier this year, but recently had as many as 1,500 full-time and part-time employees.”

The Maine Arts Commission is taking applications for the next Maine State Poet Laureate. The selected poet will serve a five-year term beginning July 1, 2026, and concluding June 30, 2031. “The laureate is charged with advancing public appreciation for poetry through community engagement, events, and projects, as well as supporting the Commission’s administration of the national Poetry Out Loud program.” The position comes with an honorarium of $5,000 per year for five years. Eligible applicants must be full-time Maine residents “with a distinguished body of poetic work.” The state’s current poet laureate is Julia Bouwsma.

Book editor Chuck Adams has died, Publishers Lunch reports. A longtime editor at Algonquin Books, Adams was the subject of an early installment of the Agents & Editors series, telling contributing editor Jofie Ferrari-Adler in 2008: “I believe very strongly that books are not about writers, and they’re definitely not about editors—they’re about readers. You’ve got to grab the reader right away with your voice and with the story you’re telling. You can’t just write down words that sound pretty. It’s all about the reader.” Adams was honored with the Editor’s Award from Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization that publishes Poets & Writers Magazine, in 2013. 

Quirk Books, the publisher of titles such as the debut novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2011) by Ransom Riggs and the parody novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) by Seth Grahame-Smith, has been sold to Andrews McMeel Publishing, according to Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch.

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, the New York Times reports. Six Nobel Prizes are awarded every year; the other fields recognized are medicine (“awarded on Monday to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi for their discoveries around peripheral immune tolerance”), physics, chemistry, economic science, and peace work.