No real surprise: "Romance dominated in terms of genre popularity across the US, with 22 states seeing it as their top searched genre. … Romance was especially popular in the south.” - Book Riot
“The 336 boxes constituting the Didion-Dunne archive are available to researchers starting today, by appointment, and even the most cursory look through them is revealing, fascinating, and simply entertaining. Scholars will be picking through it all for centuries, but here’s a first-day look at a few of the more eye-opening objects.” - Vulture (MSN)
“The new decision from U.S. District Judge Stephen Locher again temporarily blocked the part of the law that prohibits school libraries and classrooms from carrying books that depict sex acts.” - AP
Built in 1904, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House needs to renovate an emergency exit to become an accessible main entrance for Canadians after the U.S. government announced it is limiting access to that entrance, which is located steps into Derby Line, Vt. - CBC
“As high schoolers staged a walkout Monday, parents filed suit against St. Francis Area Schools alleging the district unlawfully banned dozens of books based on the ideas they contained and the ratings of an anonymous website that recently went dark.” - The Minnesota Star Tribune
“Lapham’s Quarterly, the magazine of history and ideas founded by the legendary editor Lewis Lapham, who died in July of 2024, announced today that it will relaunch this year under the stewardship of Bard College and its Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. The print publication had been on hiatus since November 2023.” - Literary Hub
For mid-19th-century Britons, proving that this elusive script could be understood meant pulling back the curtain on a distant, vanished, yet hauntingly familiar world, one that had given birth to humanity’s modern mind. - The Smithsonian
The sense that Shakespeare spoke the language of the oppressors, yet also a language that helped think beyond that oppression, was not unique to Baldwin. It is revealed in the way so many writers and directors from the global south have constantly reworked the 16th-century playwright to illuminate contemporary struggles and tensions. - The Guardian
"I've been here a while, and I've seen books come back that were due in the '80s and the '90s and even the '70s, but this is the first time I've come across a book that was almost a century overdue." - WVXU
What texts are these? Books of Ukrainian history, literature, culture, and just about anything in the Ukrainian language that Ukrainian students would study — if the Russian occupiers weren’t trying to erase Ukrainian identity. - The Guardian
Mass resignations of journal editors are becoming more frequent. They highlight the tension between running a for-profit publishing business and upholding research integrity. - The Conversation
Internal communications show employees saying that Meta did indeed torrent LibGen, which means that Meta could have not only accessed pirated material but also distributed it to others—well established as illegal under copyright law, regardless of what the courts determine about the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. - The Atlantic
More than 2.6 million books were self-published in 2023 – many of which are uploaded to the dominant platform, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing – and they can’t all be masterpieces. Nevertheless, the idea that self-publishing is the preserve of hopeless hobbyists producing books no one wants to read is at least a decade out of date. - The Guardian
The chair of the Alabama Republican Party said board members believe the Fairhope library is in violation of state policies to protect children from inappropriate materials. The books cited by the upset parents included “Sold,” a National Book Award finalist about a girl who is sold into sexual slavery in India. - CNN
“Books matter,” said Thibaut Willems, owner of Le Pied à Terre independent bookshop in Paris’s 18th arrondissement and one of the booksellers taking a stand by limiting their orders of Hachette Livre books and placing them on lower shelves. - The Guardian
