"Helped by a 1.7% increase in the fourth quarter, unit sales of print books fell only 2.6% in 2023 from 2022. ... The dip was less than many industry members had feared this summer, when sales were steadily declining and were down 4.1% after the first nine months of the year." - Publishers Weekly
"Just under 300 people responded to the survey, which was intended to collect data about copyright, payment, royalties, and other labor issues. … Only 11.5% of respondents reported earning 100% of their income from literary translation work, and … 63.5% reported an annual income of less than $10,000 from literary translation." - Publishers Weekly
For all its newfound task as “knowledge navigator and facilitator” in an increasingly complex and connected world, the library’s traditional role has also benefited from its new home: library book loans, far from declining, have risen by almost 10%. - The Guardian
“Libraries are places where people from all different backgrounds can interact,” Buzzy Nielsen, a program manager for the State Library of Oregon, said. “You see a big cross-section of your community.” - Oregon ArtsWatch
Sure, Google Translate can help out with ordering a coffee in another language, but "neural machine-translation models can translate only about 30 percent of novel excerpts—usually simple passages—with acceptable quality, as determined by native speakers." - The Atlantic
Evie Woods's The Lost Bookshop is her fourth novel, and it's outselling nearly everyone else's novels at the moment. But don't ask her to talk about the next one. "A lot of writers are a bit secretive; if you tell other people they might ruin it." - Irish Times
After the fire, the artist went to the American Academy in Rome. "I always say Rome was a great place to be depressed. I could not paint in my airy Academy studio with its spectacular views over the city. Instead, I went to museums" - and started a novel. - LitHub
Quantifying my reading, whether by titles finished, pages read, or another metric, doesn’t capture the quality of my attention to each book. - The Atlantic
"It's worth asking now, five years after Roth’s death, whether they have eclipsed the actual work that Roth produced, or any true reckoning with the man himself. … Will (his) literary output enjoy the same immortality as that of the persona he created?" - The Atlantic (MSN)
Last spring, the library in Lake Luzerne announced, as a one-time event, a drag queen story hour. After months of strife that included a bomb threat and a fistfight at a council meeting, most of the staff and board resigned and the library had to shut down. - The New York Times
The emergence of English as the predominant (though not exclusive) international language is seen by many as a positive phenomenon with several practical advantages and no downside. However, it also raises problems that are slowly beginning to be understood and studied. - The Guardian
"A federal judge has blocked two key portions of SF 496, a recently passed Iowa state law that sought to ban books with sexual content from Iowa schools and to bar classroom discussion of gender identity and sexuality for students below the seventh grade." - Publishers Weekly
"Louise Glück’s … mode of lamentation was her signature, and it seems fitting that one of her poems occasions the end of this column after nine years." - The New York Times Magazine
Syriac, a 2,000-year-old tongue closely related to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus of Nazareth, is today the language of Iraq's Orthodox Christians, a community whose numbers have fallen from 1.5 million to 400,000 over the last twenty war-torn years. A new all-Syriac network is helping keep the language alive. - The World
The trial judge ruled that defendant Hadi Matar and his attorney are entitled to a copy of the manuscript and related material as part of preparing their defense. They are to reply on Wednesday whether they want to postpone the trial until they can receive and read the book. - AP
