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At a moment when polls show 40 percent of American adults did not read a book in the last year, one book is nonetheless selling at record rates: the Bible. Publishers Weekly reports that Bible sales hit record highs in the United States and the U.K. in 2025, continuing an upward sales trend begun in 2021. Mark Schoenwald, CEO of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, notes that study Bibles are among the iterations of the text with sales that have soared: “What that tells me is people are not just buying Bibles, but they’re actually trying to read them and understand them and then apply them to their lives.”

Literary Hub has announced the forty fellows of the 2026 Periplus collective mentorship program for writers of color who live and work in the United States. Each fellow will be paired with an established writer who is a member of the collective and they will meet on a monthly basis “to foster community, support their writing practice, and advise on the nitty gritty of making a career as an artist.” This is the collective’s sixth year running these fellowships and they chose their newest mentees from over five hundred applicants. 

Tor Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan known for its genre fiction and prose titles, has announced the retirements of two executives: Patrick Nielsen Hayden, editor-at-large, and Linda Quinton, publisher and VP of Forge Books, Publishers Weekly reports. Separately, Hayden and Quinton spent almost forty years at the company before ending their time there on January 5. Hayden is a three-time Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning editor, and Quinton led Forge Books, an imprint of Tor that focuses on both fiction and nonfiction, for nine years. 

OverDrive—a digital platform that furnishes e-books, audiobooks, and other digital media to public libraries—has responded to Washington, D.C.’s  proposed Library E-book Pricing Fairness Amendment Act of 2025, Publishers Marketplace reports. If enacted, the legislation would aim “to prohibit libraries from paying more to license an item than the public would and avoid limiting the number of licenses and loans the library can engage in” at a time when e-book licensing prices have surged. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash challenged the measure by citing the district’s reduced spending per patron even as e-book circulation has increased. 

Utah has added three new titles to its growing list of books prohibited in the state’s public schools, banning The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult, and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “The additions bring Utah’s total number of banned books to twenty-two.”

Kelly Jensen of Book Riot looks at a new YouGov poll released at the end of December 2025 that reveales American’s reading habits over the last year. The headline? Forty percent of Americans did not pick up a single book in 2025. “Perhaps that’s worth spinning in a more positive light. Most Americans, 60 percent, did read a book in 2025.” Other results of the survey show that those who identify as female read at higher rates, 63 percent, than male counterparts, and the age group that read the most books were those between 30 and 44.

Kelvin Watson, executive director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District (LVCCLD), has been named Library Journal’s 2026 Librarian of the Year. Starting this new role at LVCCLD in the spring of 2021, after COVID-19 shutdowns, and serving as the first full-time African American library director in the state of Nevada, Watson and his leadership has led to LVCCLD receiving numerous awards, such as the American Library Association (ALA)/Information Today, Inc. Library of the Future Award (from 2022-2024); the 2023 ALA Medal of Excellence Award; and the 2023 Urban Libraries Council Innovation Award for Anti-Racism, Digital Equity, and Inclusion, among others. Watson remarked that his basic principles of access, discovery, and delivery have remained consistent for him throughout the years. “Those three words have been with me, probably, my entire library career.” 

The New York Times takes a look at what drove the book business in 2025, a year when readers bought around 184 million print adult fiction books. In a nutshell, some of this year’s biggest books were genre novels, sales of romance titles are still rising, and the Bible is a best-seller. “One prediction that appears overblown is the idea that readers would fully adopt digital book formats, causing sales of print books to plummet the way sales of physical newspapers have. But people seem to like reading paper books, which make up roughly three-quarters of book sales, according to the Association of American Publishers. At the same time, sales of e-books have shrunk, even after all but replacing the mass market paperback during the 2010s.”

Kristin Hannah’s best-selling novel The Women was among the most checked-out books in U.S. public libraries this year, NPR reports. “As it happens, books by women dominated most-borrowed library lists in 2025.... Three of the top ten titles for the country’s biggest public library system, in New York City, were part of a best-selling romantasy series by Rebecca Yarros: Fourth Wing, Iron Flame and Onyx Storm.”

Bethanne Patrick writes for the Washington Post about V. V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Random House, 2023) and how the novel illuminates the experiences of civilian women during the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Ganeshananthan says she wanted “to put those women at the center…. Students, dissidents, health-care workers, people living in proximity to those bearing arms, people displaced from their homes, all of that.” She adds, “my novel is in part about a woman’s mind and consciousness. I’m thrilled to get the opportunity to go beyond why that’s a worthy topic and delve into what she thinks, the very real and varied kinds of labor she undertakes in a world that would try to give her less agency than she would seize for herself.” Brotherless Night has received multiple awards including the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024, and the Asian Prize for Fiction in 2023.

The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that Amanda Jones’s 2022 defamation case against two men who accused her of promoting pornography to children can continue, Publishers Weekly reports. Jones, a school librarian, spoke up against proposed book bans and the censorship of books about LGBTQ people and people of color. After the men claimed she was advocating to make pornography accessible to children and grooming them, she filed a defamation lawsuit. After multiple dismissals and denied appeals, the Louisiana Supreme Court ordered the appeals court to hear the case on the merits. One of the justices filed a concurrence, stating, “The burden will be on defendants to prove that plaintiff did in fact do the acts they have publicly accused her of.” Jones is not seeking significant damages—just $1 and an apology. “We teach our children to report and speak out against bullying, and that is what I am doing,” she said.

Emily Eakin writes for the New York Times about the “plagiarism plot” in contemporary literature. Referencing works such as Yellowface (William Morrow, 2023) by R. F. Kuang, A Lonely Man (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) by Chris Power, and Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024) by Danzy Senna, among others, Eakin writes, “it would be possible to assemble an entire library of diverting and accomplished contemporary work fixated on literary imitation, appropriation, and theft.” While she understands the “anxiety of influence” for writers of fiction as a “hazard of the trade,” Eakin argues that the presence of these stories has oversaturated the literary landscape.

HarperCollins has cut ties with children’s book author David Walliams, and he has been dropped from the Waterstones children’s book festival, following “allegations of inappropriate behavior towards young women” and “junior female staff” at HarperCollins UK, the Guardian reports. “One woman who raised concerns is understood to have left the company after reaching a settlement that included a five-figure payout. After the investigation, the publisher decided it would no longer release new titles by the author.” Walliams has denied the allegations.

Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker about the slow struggle of the dictionary, once a staple of every household, in the age of the internet. A new book, Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary (Atlantic Monthly Press), serves as “a good-natured and sympathetic account of what seems to be a losing struggle,” he writes. “Fatsis concludes, a little reluctantly, not only that the dictionary may be on its last legs as a commercial enterprise but that lexicographical expertise is expiring with it. He cites an estimate that, twenty-five years ago, there were two hundred full-time lexicographers in the U.S. Today, he thinks that the number is ‘probably closer to thirty.’”