Daily News

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch shares the latest developments in the Anthropic lawsuit, the $1.5 billion settlement of which is being questioned by Judge William Alsup, who last week gave a list of seventeen questions for the attorneys and has now added to that list with seventeen more. Among them, Cader writes, are questions about the “situation in which multiple claims are submitted for the same work” and the claims process itself, asking for it “to involve the submission of documents—such as contracts—that would confirm who has legal standing and how proceeds are to be split.”

Anne Enright, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Max Porter, Sally Rooney, and Viet Thanh Nguyen are among a group of authors who have signed a letter urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a program for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars, and artists from Gaza, the Guardian reports. The program was “abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a ‘collective punishment.’” The Pause program was established in 2017 to help “foreign researchers, scientists, intellectuals, and artists who find themselves in emergency situations.”

Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against Penguin Random House, the New York Times, and four New York Times reporters, including Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, authors of Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success (Penguin Press, 2024), arguing that three New York Times articles and the subsequent book are “malicious, defamatory, and disparaging,” and written “with actual malice, calculated to inflict maximum damage upon President Trump during the height of a presidential election,” Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch reports. The lawsuit “also accuses the newspaper as being ‘a leading, and unapologetic, purveyor of falsehoods against President Trump.’” Spokespersons for Penguin Random House and the New York Times say the lawsuit has no merit.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch untangles some of the complex issues surrounding Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright infringment settlement, including what one Big 5 publisher is doing about copyrights that were not properly registered to participate in the class-action lawsuit. Macmillan “has been communicating to authors and agents who have inquired about unregistered copyrights, acknowledging, ‘From what we currently understand, this was largely our mistake and we take full responsibility. If your work was excluded from the settlement for this reason, we will make you whole by paying you what you otherwise would have been paid under the settlement.’” Cader adds that “agents and authors hope that Macmillan’s position will inspire others.”

Arthur Sze has been named the new U.S. poet laureate, succeeding Ada Limón, who has held the position since 2022. The winner of the Library of Congress’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, and other honors, Sze will begin his laureateship with a reading on October 9. During his term as poet laureate, Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, plans to have a special focus on poetry in translation.

The former co-owners of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store have launched a new publishing, Left Field Publishing, which will publish both adult and children’s books, Publishers Weekly reports. “According to its mission statement, Left Field is committed to publishing ‘powerful, beautifully-told stories that fall outside the traditional lines.’ It will focus on authors ‘whose work blends genres, expands minds, and invites conversation.’” 

Capping off a week of announcements by the National Book Foundation, the New Yorker shares the longlist for the National Book Award in fiction: Rabih Alameddine for The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) (Grove), Susan Choi for Flashlight (FSG), Angela Flournoy for The Wilderness (Mariner), Jonas Hassen Khemiri for The Sisters (FSG), Megha Majumdar for A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf), Kevin Moffett for Only Son (McSweeney’s), Karen Russell for The Antidote (Knopf ), Ethan Rutherford for North Sun: Or, the Voyage of the Whaleship Esther (A Strange Object), Bryan Washington for Palaver (FSG), and Joy Williams for The Pelican Child (Knopf ). 

Funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for fiscal 2026 “cleared a legislative hurdle this week,” Publishers Weekly reports, with the House Appropriations Committee endorsing a $291.8 million budget and the Senate Appropriations Committee also approving that amount. The budget now goes to the Senate and House of Representatives for a full vote. 

The National Book Foundation revealed the longlist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The list includes Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf), Caleb Gayle’s Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead Books), Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ben Ratliff’s Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening (Graywolf Press), and others. The finalists will be announced on October 7; the winners will be revealed at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19.

A federal judge postponed approval of the proposed $1.5 billion settlement of the class action lawsuit against AI company Athropic, writing that he was “disappointed” that attorneys representing the author plaintiffs had left “important questions to be answered in the future,” Publishers Weekly reports. “In the filing, and later in court, Judge Alsup expressed skepticism about the entire resolution process, including the timeline, noting that it relies on input from the Author-Publisher Working Group, which will then face challenges by Anthropic, all of which needs to be completed before the October 10 deadline. Before a preliminary approval can be granted, Alsup ruled that those ‘critical choices will need to be confirmed well before October 10.’”

The reading skills of American high school students have reached a three-decade low, according to new federal testing data, the New York Times reports. “The test scores are the first of their kind to be released since the COVID-19 pandemic upended education. They are yet another sign that adolescents are struggling in the wake of the virus, when schools were closed for months or more. They also arrive at a time when Americans overall are abandoning printed text for screen time and video-dominated social media, which experts have linked to declining academics.”

Oprah Winfrey has selected Elizabeth Gilbert’s new memoir, All the Way to the River (Riverhead Books, 2025), as her latest book club pick, the Associated Press reports. “In Gilbert’s book, published this week, the author writes of a consuming love affair with the self-destructive and terminally ill Rayya Elias, a onetime friend for whom the author left her husband.” Winfrey, clearly a fan of Gilbert’s previous memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Riverhead Books, 2006), said, “This new memoir is just as powerful—raw, unflinching, and deeply healing. She bares her soul, sharing her truth so openly, she offers readers the courage to face their own.”

Katy Hershberger of Publishers Lunch reports on the latest class action lawsuit involving artificial intelligence, this one against Apple. Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed the suit in the Northern District of California, alleging that the company illegally used their copyrighted books to help train its artificial intelligence systems. “The lawsuit asserts that Apple used the pirated dataset Books3 to train its language models, and that the company’s Applebot software scraped pirate sites to obtain copyrighted books. It also notes that Apple entered a licensing deal with Shutterstock to train its genAI tools, but not with authors.”

The Los Angeles Times has more on Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright settlement that some say could redefine how artificial intelligence companies compensate copyright holders. “Although the award was massive and unprecedented, it could have been much worse, according to some calculations. If Anthropic were charged a maximum penalty for each of the millions of works it used to train its AI, the bill could have been more than $1 trillion, some calculations suggest.”

Fran Hoepfner of New York magazine takes readers into the world of Tiny Bookshop, a management-style video game from Skystone Games in which the player makes decisions about the little bookstore housed in a trailer parked in the small coastal town of Bookstonbury-by-the-Sea. “Every day follows the same pattern: You decide where in Bookstonbury you want to set up shop (outside the supermarket, by a café downtown, at the beach, etc.), stock your store with real books (titles include everything from Pride and Prejudice to Angels & Demons) and seasonal or environmentally appropriate decorations (ranging from plants to an umbrella stand on rainy days), and then you open up shop out of a wagon hitched to your hatchback.”

George Saunders will receive the 2025 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19, the National Book Foundation announced. A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, Saunders is the author of thirteen books, including the story collection Liberation Day (Random House, 2022). A new novel, Vigil, is forthcoming in January 2026.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Books Inc., the Bay Area’s oldest independent bookstore, is seeking bankruptcy court approval to be acquired by Barnes & Noble for $3.25 million. “The San Leandro-based bookseller, which filed for Chapter 11 protection in January after years of financial strain, said the proposed sale will preserve its seven neighborhood stores and two locations at San Francisco International Airport.” If the acquisition goes through, it would be similar to Barnes & Noble’s 2024 purchase of Denver’s Tattered Cover Book Store, which also filed for Chapter 11.

Best-selling novelist James Patterson has launched his “Go Finish Your Book” campaign by announcing the first twelve recipients of grants to authors, CBS News reports. Each author will receive up to $50,000 to help them complete their manuscript. The new new program was organized in partnership with PEN America, the Authors Guild, and other organizations.

Riley Dunn of the Daily Iowan writes about the life cycle of a book and the many hands and sets of eyes a manuscript passes through on its way to publication, using the editorial and production processes at the University of Iowa Press as examples. “Sometimes, writers feel as though changes to their work mean they have done something wrong or that their work is not sufficient. Editors realize this stress but recognize the benefits of an extra set of eyes on work,” Dunn writes.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reports on authors who are finding “that their publishers may not have formally registered copyright for their books with the U.S. Copyright Office as stipulated by contract—which means those titles would not be eligible to participate in the Anthropic class action settlement.” The settlement agreement will be filed with the court on September 5; a hearing on a motion for preliminary approval will be held on September 8.

Julie Schaper, the president of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, will step down in June 2026, Publishers Weekly reports. Consortium represents nearly 170 companies, including a number of literary presses and publishers of poetry. A search for Schaper’s successor is underway.

Spoken, a new AI audiobook company based in Portland, Oregon, claims to offer a process that “deeply analyzes each manuscript and its characters to recommend or custom-generate the perfect voices. These voices—whether drawn from our AI voice actor catalog or crafted from character descriptions—are used to deliver single, dual, or full-cast narration that reflects your story’s tone, texture, and emotional depth.”

Japanese novelist Rie Qudan talks to John Self of the Guardian about her rationale for using ChatGPT to write her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, which won the Akutagawa Prize last year and will be published by Simon & Schuster, in an English translation by Jesse Kirkwood, on September 2. Self writes, “Qudan said that part of it—5 percent was the figure given, though she now says that was only an approximation—was written using artificial intelligence. This, she tells me, comprised parts of the novel which are presented as a character’s exchange with ChatGPT. But Qudan also ‘gained a lot of inspiration’ for the novel through ‘exchanges with AI and from the realisation that it can reflect human thought processes in interesting ways.’ Qudan’s use of AI, in other words, seeks not to deceive the reader but to help us to see its effects.”

The finalists for the 2025 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with eighteen books in three categories—fiction, nonfiction, and young reader’s literature—in contention for the annual awards. The winner in each category will receive $50,000. The finalists in fiction are The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy, Isola by Allegra Goodman, A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar, The Slip by Lucas Schaefer, and Flesh by David Szalay. The winners will be announced on October 8.

Publishers Weekly reports on the publishing industry’s sales estimates for 2024 from the Association of American Publishers. “Total sales rose 4.1 percent, to $32.5 billion, while unit sales increased 3.4 percent, to 3.1 billion,” Jim Millot writes. “The final 2024 numbers combine the $14.2 billion reported to the AAP by the 1,281 publishers who take part in the association’s monthly StatShot program as well $18.3 billion in estimated sales. The new figures show slightly slower growth than those released earlier this year, which only included reported revenue that showed a 6.5 percent sales increase.”

PEN America has received a $1.4 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its work on the freedom to read, with a heightened focus on supporting public libraries and librarians. “This gift will enable PEN America to extend its groundbreaking research and analysis, public awareness campaigns, and coalition building to include public libraries and librarians who are facing escalating threats to their work, safety and core mission,” PEN America writes.

C-SPAN has announced a new TV series that will feature “thought-provoking conversations with leading authors, policymakers, business innovators and cultural figures,” People magazine reports. Set to debut in the fall, America’s Book Club will be hosted by David Rubenstein, who will be joined by authors John Grisham, Walter Isaacson, Stacy Schiff, and David Grann as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Harvard University professor and historian Henry Louis Gates, and chef-restauranteur José Andrés, among others.

Ron Charles of the Washington Post writes about the future of book reviews in light of the Associated Press’s decision to no longer produce them. “If you subscribe to one of the few major newspapers with its own books coverage, you’ll be fine,” he writes. “But readers of papers across the country won’t see reviews syndicated from the AP after Aug. 31.”