The A.I. voice generation platform ElevenLabs has created a new audiobook edition of the Odyssey using the voice of the actor Michael Caine, according to the New York Times. Caine licensed his voice to the company, which a team of four producers then used to created the audiobook, which also includes twenty different A.I. voices as well as A.I.-generated sound effects and a musical score. “The idea was, What would be an amazing piece of content, to show what’s possible in the responsible use of A.I. voice featuring an iconic voice?” Jack McDermott, head of mobile growth and marketing at ElevenLabs, said. “On the one hand, it’s about great storytelling. At the same time, this has a really great effect of showing creators around the world, and authors, what can be done with ElevenReader.”

Ann Patchett has been named the winner of the 2026 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The annual prize honors an American writer whose “body of work is distinguished by its mastery of the art, as well as its originality of thought and imagination.” Patchett is the author of ten novels, most recently& Whistler (Harper, 2026), as well as nonfiction and children’s books. She is also the owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, and an advocate for independent bookstores. She will receive her award at the National Book Festival on August 22.

Ingram Library Services and Penguin Random House will be joining forces on a print-on-demand program that will supply libraries with popular backlist titles, Publishers Weekly reports. The program includes 200 titles across all genres, and the hope is that other publishers will eventually participate as well. “The beauty of print-on-demand,” Carolyn Morris, vice president of ILS, said, “is that we can have all of these books available for order, we can manufacture and ship them the same day, and we can do that without having to allocate valuable shelf space or inventory dollars, which makes it low-risk to offer this breadth of library titles.”

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize has announced that an internal investigation found that no AI was used to write this year’s regional winners’ stories. “We held detailed discussions with all regional winners about their creative process, and they collaborated fully in our review. We also examined evidence related to the development of their stories, including working drafts, time-stamped documents and notes,” the organization said in a statement. “After a thorough consultation with our judges and careful consideration of all available information, we are satisfied that AI was not used to write the winning stories.” The overall winner of this year’s prize will be announced on June 30. The organization also added that conversations about using AI checkers going forward are underway.

As outlets publishing book reviews dwindle, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has presented an alternative by taking matters into its own hands and launching its own literary outlet, Nieman Reports writes. The publication, the Porter Square Review of Books, consists of weekly(ish) book reviews written by booksellers and writers-in-residence and published on the store’s website each week. A lack of books coverage, including book reviews, “hurts everyone in the books ecosystem: readers, writers, publishers, and, of course, bookstores,” the store said in its Porter Square Review of Books announcement. “Putting that in the context of contemporary attacks on the rewards and pleasures of deep thinking and imaginative creating only makes things more dire. Well, we’re not just going to complain about it!”

The e-book platform Rakuten Kobo had to reject 45 percent of the titles submitted to its platform last year because so many were AI-generated books, according to the Bookseller. The platform has said that it now regularly screens books for AI use and removes them from its catalogue when necessary, and is in the process of testing new AI-detection software to further refine its processes. “There has been a steady, sustained rise in more and more AI-generated content,” chief executive Michael Tamblyn said. “We would see a publisher that we had never heard of before show up with a thousand books. And we could tell that it wasn’t actually a publisher, but three LLMs in a trench coat.”

Over a hundred authors who opted out of the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement last year have filed their own lawsuit against Anthropic for copyright infringement, Publishers Lunch writes. In the suit, they say that Anthropic illegally downloaded and torrented their books from pirate websites and ask for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work. The plaintiffs also assert in their suit that they “did not discover, and could not have reasonably discovered, that their specific works were included in Anthropic’s private, internal database” until “November 24, 2025, when the direct notice to class members was completed and/or their claims were tolled pending the approval of the settlement of Bartz, or February 9, 2026, the deadline for opting out of the class action.”

Lee Boudreaux, vice president and executive editor of Doubleday, has been named the winner of this year’s Medal for Editorial Excellence from the Center for Fiction, Publishers Weekly reports. Boudreaux has worked with authors including Margaret Atwood, Percival Everett, and Curtis Sittenfeld, and has edited books that have won or been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, and more. “Anyone who’s ever received a bolded sixteen-point type email from Lee festooned with multiple exclamation points, or heard her pitch a book with her honey-laden Southern accent turned up to eleven, understands why her exuberant advocacy has propelled so many of the novels she has edited to outsized success,” Bill Thomas, publisher and editor-in-chief at Doubleday, is quoted saying.

The literary magazine Granta has announced that it will no longer participate in “external publishing partnerships” where it doesn’t have editorial oversight, according to the Guardian. This decision was made following controversy surrounding this year’s Commonwealth short story prize, one of whose winners was widely accused of having used AI after his story was published in the magazine. “We will keep the Commonwealth prize shortlisted stories on our website in the public interest, and wish our former partner, the Commonwealth Foundation, all the best in its work,” Granta said in a statement.

The Green Book Alliance has launched its GBA Book Carbon Calculator, Publishers Weekly reports. The free, web-based tool is meant to help publishers and other organizations in the book industry measure and understand their carbon footprint. Users can assess the carbon footprint of an individual book, plan and track organizational sustainability progress, and make lower-impact decisions around production. “Editors and publishers can also use the calculator during planning stages to understand how different production choices may affect a book’s environmental impact,” Jarin Pintana, the project manager who oversaw the development of the calculator, said.

Google Play Books has announced that it will launch a generative AI in-book chatbot, which they call a “reading companion,” according to Publishers Lunch. The tool will provide readers with recaps or give them the option to ask questions about the text. As of July 6, it will be automatically enabled for most English-language books. Users will be able to opt out if they wish, and authors and publishers will also be able to opt out in the future. Google notes that “only users who have an entitlement to the book (purchase, rental) are able to use Book Insights.”

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller list for the week ending June 14, 2026. The list is compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identifies “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” New to the list this week are Harvest Season (The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy #2) (Slowburn) by Brynne Weaver, at no. 2, and Earth 7 (Graywolf Press) by Deb Olin Unferth, at no. 25.

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize—the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States—has announced its 2026 finalists. The finalists in nonfiction are By the Second Spring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Danielle Leavitt, Free (Grand Central Publishing) by Amanda Knox, Mother Emanuel (Crown) by Kevin Sack, Original Sins (One World) by Eve L. Ewing, The Jailhouse Lawyer (Penguin Press) by Calvin Duncan and Sophie Cull, and The Prosecutor (Crown) by Jack Fairweather. The finalists in fiction are Bad Bad Girl (Knopf) by Gish Jen, Outside Women (University Press of Kentucky) by Roohi Choudhry, The Antidote (Knopf) by Karen Russell, The Sunflower Boys (Harper Collins) by Sam Wachman, Too Soon (Avid Reader Press) by Betty Shamieh, and Wild Dark Shore (Flatiron Books) by Charlotte McConaghy. In addition, Ann Patchett was named the winner of the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for a writer whose work fosters peace, social justice, and global understanding. “If you wait to find a way to bring peace to the world there’s a good chance that nothing will be accomplished. Instead, I recommend bringing about peace in any small way that is available to you. Live as peacefully and as generously as possible,” Patchett said upon receiving the honor.

A rare first edition copy of Wuthering Heights complete with spelling mistakes is up for auction for the first time in over a hundred years, the Associated Press writes. Only about 250 copies of the first edition were printed, and this one has been in a private library for most of that time. The book is being sold together with a copy of Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey, and the two are expected to sell for between 400,000 and 600,000 pounds (approximately $540,000 and $800,000) at Christie’s auction house in London later this month. “The vast majority of surviving copies were rebound for collectors or libraries, meaning original cloth examples are now extremely scarce,” Mark Wiltshire, Christie’s books and manuscripts specialist, said.

Thirteen publishers including the Big Five, McGraw Hill, and Wiley have joined forces to sue the pirate website WeLib for copyright infringement, according to Publishers Weekly. The plaintiffs say that WeLib copied the source code and most of the contents of Anna’s Archive, a website that lost its own suit against publishers last month. “Defendants boast that they have reproduced ‘an endless collection of literature, research papers, and education materials,’ none of which they own or have licensed,” the complaint alleges. WeLib’s website claims to host over 43 million books. The complaint also alleges that WeLib is turning a profit by offering users fast downloads in exchange for “donations.”

Memoirist Amy Griffin filed a lawsuit earlier this week accusing a former classmate of defamation, the New York Times reports. Griffin’s memoir, The Tell (The Dial Press, 2025), details her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of a teacher, a memory she says she only recovered thirty years later while doing MDMA therapy. Earlier this year, Griffin’s classmate filed a lawsuit in which she alleged that two episodes in the book bore an uncanny similarity to things that had happened to her and accusing Griffin of appropriating her story. Zach Rosenblatt, a lawyer for Griffin’s classmate, said that Griffin’s subsequent lawsuit is “part of a public relations damage control campaign,” while Thomas A. Clare, a lawyer for Griffin, said that “this lawsuit’s purpose is to make the truth known.”

Last Friday, Lambda Literary announced its 2026 prizewinners. The awards, also known as the Lammys, “were created in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, which had established a foothold through a nascent network of lesbian and gay publishers and bookstores.” This year’s winners were selected by a panel of eighty literary professionals from more than 1,300 submissions. Among the winners are Hungerstone (Zando) by Kat Dunn, which won the award for lesbian fiction; Nova Scotia House (Nightboat Books) by Charlie Porter, which won the award for gay fiction; Guest Privileges (Dzanc Books) by Gaar Adams, which won the award for LGBTQ+ nonfiction; and YEET! (Omnidawn Publishing) by jason b crawford, which won the award for LGBTQ+ poetry.

Recently, it has seemed as though new books are getting more and more expensive, but USA Today reports that book prices actually haven’t kept up with inflation. Part of the reason they seem so costly is that e-books have shifted our perception of how much a book ought to cost. And then, of course, there is the reality that the rest of life’s expenses—groceries, insurance, gas—are inflating, and there’s less wiggle room left in the budget for readers to spend thirty dollars on a hardcover book. While many people think that publishers keep most of the money, the reality is that they are struggling too. “A twenty dollar book ends up netting two or three dollars for the publisher at the end of the day,” Keith Riegert, president of the independent publishing collective the Stable Book Group, said.

Roxane Gay and Debbie Millman, the new owners of the online literary magazine the Rumpus, have detailed some of their plans for the publication to Publishers Weekly. Though they plan to retain the spirit of the Rumpus, some coverage areas will be different: There will be more of a focus on politics, and on cultural criticism. The magazine is also diversifying its audience with a Spanish-language vertical called El Alboroto helmed by three editors who are fluent in the language, and a column written and edited by people who are or have been incarcerated. “With America being seduced by AI, there’s going to be even more of an appetite for craft, for soul, for work that still is original and heartbreaking and bone-tingling,” Millman said. “More than ever there needs to be original voices that are beholden to no one but the reader.”

This year marks a century since the founding of the Book of the Month Club, Publishers Weekly writes, and a decade since chairman John Lippman relaunched the service with the goal of appealing to younger readers and those who are more likely to buy books online. Lippman said that the organization has grown every year since its rebrand, and that its membership now skews towards Gen Z women rather than millennials. To celebrate its centennial, Book of the Month launched a splashy ad campaign poking fun at the idea that “nobody reads anymore,” and is also offering special editions of classics like Catcher in the Rye and Native Son. “Just like in the 1920s,” Lippman said, “we fundamentally believe in the book business.”