Amazon’s latest earnings reports boast record-setting numbers, Publishers Weekly reports, attributed to “explosive” sales at company’s cloud computing business, AWS. Demand for AWS led to a 14 percent increase in fourth quarter sales as the company hit $213.4 billion in revenue. The news comes on the heels of the layoff of three hundred reporters at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the dissolution of the newspaper’s books section.

Sales of Wuthering Heights are “skyrocketing” ahead of the release of director Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the Emily Brontë classic, the Guardian reports. Penguin Classics UK notes a 459 percent increase in sales of the title in the United Kingdom; 10,670 copies of the book flew off British shelves in January 2026, as opposed to 1,875 in January 2025. Jess Harrison of Penguin Classics reflected on the surge in interest: “There seems to be a real yearning among readers for intense, maximalist, tragic love stories. We’ve seen huge demand for similarly angsty classics like Dostoevsky’s White Nights and Sabahattin Ali’s Madonna in a Fur Coat. But Wuthering Heights stands apart in being so wild and unhinged—an extreme book for extreme times.”

For the New York Times, Elizabeth A. Harris considers the fate of the mass market paperback, the inexpensively-bound editions that have found their readers in train stations and airports, supermarket aisles and drug stores since the 1930s. In spite of its appeal, the form is endangered: “Sales have dropped for years, peeled away by e-books, digital audiobooks and even more expensive formats like hardcovers and trade paperbacks, the mass market’s larger and pricier cousin.” With only “about a 30 cent difference” in cost between printing a mass market edition versus a trade paperback—but a much higher potential retail price—publishers are shifting gears. Still, the form has enduring fans. Paula Rabinowitz, author of a cultural history of the mass market paperback, sees inspiration in its design: “It was one of the most brilliant technologies in the history of the world, precisely because you could shove it in your purse or your pocket.”

The Whiting Foundation has appointed two inaugural resident directors to provide creative direction for the Whiting Award for Emerging Writers and the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress, reports Publishers Weekly. Adam Kirsch, a senior editor at the Atlantic, and Peter Godwin, a former president of PEN America, will serve the emerging writers and nonfiction programs, respectively. The foundation believes this new model “encourages new voices and perspectives, while strengthening Whiting’s commitment to writers at pivotal points in their careers.”

Spotify announced a partnership with Bookshop.org, which will allow users of the audio streaming service to buy physical books from independent bookstores. Set to launch later this spring, Spotify users in the United States and the United Kingdom will be able to access titles on Bookshop.org directly from Spotify’s app. Additionally, the streaming company introduced a new Page Match feature that will allow “readers [to] seamlessly switch between the printed (or e-book) and audiobook versions of a title.” 

Amidst the ongoing resistance to ICE operations in the Twin Cities, the Public Library Association (PLA) is prepared to move forward with their biennial conference at the Minneapolis Convention and Visitors Bureau from April 1-3. The association shared that they are “heartbroken by recent events and [have] been coordinating closely with city and venue partners to support them and to foster a safe and welcoming conference environment” as they “look forward to gathering in strength and solidarity with Minnesota colleagues” and everyone around the country. Offering a virtual option as well, PLA urges attendees to download the conference app for full updates and include a list of suggestions to support safe travel to and around the city for those joining in person. 

The 57th annual Cairo International Book Fair closed yesterday after setting new records for attendance, the Arab Weekly reports. More than 6.2 million visitors are believed to have attended the fair, which ran from January 21 to February 3. Over 1,450 publishing houses from 83 countries were represented at the fair, which has evolved to be “more than a marketplace” for publishing in Africa and the Middle East; this year’s gathering offered “a sprawling forum for debate, performance, and encounter, with dedicated programs for children and young people, subsidized book schemes, and initiatives designed to widen access to reading.”

A press release from Bookshop.org has announced a new partnership with Draft2Digital which will allow hundreds of thousands of self-published e-books to be sold through the Amazon alternative’s website. Bookshop.org began selling e-books in 2025, generating over $9.5 million in revenue for its independent bookstore partners, with over 200,000 e-book sales transacted through the Bookshop.org app; the new collaboration will add “a new, sustainable revenue stream” as the catalogue of Draft2Digital titles become available through Bookshop.org. Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter celebrated the collaboration: “Partnering with Draft2Digital means self-published authors, an essential and rapidly growing part of the publishing landscape, can now work with indie bookstores, and they can support each other."

“After weeks of rumors about impending layoffs, employees at the Washington Post were informed Wednesday morning that the Jeff Bezos–owned newspaper would be eliminating its books section, Book World, along with an array of other sections,” reports Publishers Weekly. Book World had relaunched in 2022 under the leadership of John Williams, previously of the New York Times Book Review, and was staffed by acclaimed critics including Ron Charles, Michael Dirda, and Becca Rothschild. Book World editor John Brogan noted that traffic to the section had been “quite good on the whole,” even as other major news outlets have made the decision to end their books coverage. In total, around one-third of the Washington Post’s staff will be eliminated by job cuts, including three hundred journalists out of the eight hundred who comprise the newsroom, reported the New York Times. “I know that every one of us believes deeply in this place and we all want to save it,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. (Critic Ron Charles was interviewed about his work at the Post by Michael Taeckens in the May/June 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced the longlist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction: Ghostroots (Norton) by ’Pemi Aguda, Behind You Is the Sea (Harpervia) by Susan Muaddi Darraj, The Mighty Red (Harper) by Louise Erdrich, James (Doubleday) by Percival Everett, Small Rain (FSG) by Garth Greenwell, Creation Lake (Scribner) by Rachel Kushner, There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven (Mariner) by Ruben Reyes Jr., Colored Television (Riverhead) by Danzy Senna, The History of Sound Viking) by Ben Shattuck, and Devil Is Fine (Celadon) by John Vercher. “In selecting the longlist, this year’s judges—Bruce Holsinger, Deesha Philyaw, and Luis Alberto Urrea—considered 414 eligible novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2024 calendar year. Submissions came from 166 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. From this longlist, the judges will select five finalists for the 2025 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Those finalists will be announced in early March.” The winner will be announced in April.

The Association of American Literary Agents (AALA) has appointed Daniel O’Brien as its first-ever executive director, Publishers Weekly reports. O’Brien also serves as executive director of the Independent Publishers Caucus and director of Books Across Borders. (AALA president Regina Brooks spoke with Katie Arnold-Ratliff in the November/December 2024 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.)

More than twenty years after the release of her best-selling novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has completed the sequel, according to the Associated Press. The novel, Life Out of Order, will be published by Hanover Square Press on October 27. “The protagonist this time is violinist Alba DeTamble, the daughter of time traveler Henry DeTamble. She shares his Chrono-Displacement Disorder, which involuntarily propels her out of the present.” The Time Traveler’s Wife, published in 2003, was Niffenegger’s first novel and sold millions of copies. It was adapted into a film starring Rachel McAdams and Eric Bana and an HBO series starring Rose Leslie and Theo James.

Author Neil Gaiman released a statement on Monday in which he denied sexual misconduct allegations first brought forth against him a year and a half ago, the Los Angeles Times reports. Five women came forward to accuse the 65-year-old British author of sexual misconduct in the summer of 2024, appearing on a podcast, Master: The Allegations Against Neil Gaiman. “Eight women then accused the author of assault, abuse and coercion in an article published by New York magazine just over a year ago.” In his statement, Gaiman wrote: “These allegations, especially the really salacious ones, have been spread and amplified by people who seemed a lot more interested in outrage and getting clicks on headlines rather than whether things had actually happened or not.”

In the latest on the literary community’s copyright lawsuit against Google, the tech giant is claiming that Hachette and Cengage’s motion to join the widely reported suit of writers opposing them is an untimely hijacking of the case, Publishers Lunch reports. “If book publishers Cengage and Hachette…want to present ‘their own evidence and arguments’ about how Google supposedly infringed their copyrights, …they can file their own case,” their new filing states. Should the publishers be allowed to join the lawsuit, Google believes it would disrupt the proceedings and prejudice them. 

The Cornell Chronicle recently reported on a new study from their university showing that readers are interested in good stories, regardless of the main character’s gender. More specifically, researchers found that men were as willing to continue reading a story with a female main character as they were one with a leading man. This data “is contrary to the limited existing literature and contrary to widespread industry assumptions,” says Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Women showed a slight preference for reading stories about other women. 

The new president and CEO of the Frankfurt Book Fair will be Joachim Kaufmann, effective September 1, reports Publishers Weekly. The longtime CEO of German publisher Carlsen Verlag is succeeding Juergen Boos. In a statement endorsing Kaufmann, Boos said, “Few leaders in our world of books are as capable as he is of inspiring people with his ideas and convictions.” 

Those who’ve longed to go on the road with Jack Kerouac will have a singular opportunity to get their hands on the next best thing this March, when the original typescript scroll of his iconic works goes up for auction at Christie’s, the Guardian reports. Clocking in at around 12 feet in length, the manuscript that would become On the Road was typed in April 1951 over the course of three weeks, its pages of tracing paper taped together to avoid transitions to a new page. Christie’s book specialist Heather Weintraub described the experience of encountering the typescript scroll: “When you roll it out it actually looks like a road. There are no paragraphs or chapters and it uses the real names of the characters before the publisher asked Kerouac to change the names.” Previous auctions of the scroll brought controversy about whether such an artifact belongs in a private collection. “I personally hope that a public institution will buy it so it can be seen by everyone,” Weintraub said.

For Book Riot, Kelly Jensen reports on “a few ways to support our Minneapolis neighbors through literary activism” as a federal immigration crackdown continues to target the city. Solidary efforts highlighted include the Publishing for Minnesota Auction, which is open for bids through tonight, and two book drives focused on Spanish-language titles for children staying home from school to avoid ICE raids. “Whether you live in the Twin Cities or not, you can help support those who are fighting back on the ground.”

Publishers Weekly reports a second round of layoffs at Simon & Schuster, following reductions earlier this week that affected staff at all levels of the company. Around fifteen employees have lost positions in total, including Eamon Dolan, vice president and executive editor of the publisher’s flagship imprint, as well as Scribner editorial director Colin Harrison and Atria executive editor Nick Ciana. A Simon & Schuster spokesperson cited market conditions as the reason for the reduction in force.

PEN America has shared the fifty finalists for its 2026 Literary Awards, “showcasing excellence from literary superstars and new voices alike and spanning genres including fiction, poetry, drama, essays, biography, translation, nonfiction, and more.” Additionally, Edwidge Danticat and Julia Cho have been named career achievement honorees for the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, respectively. The award ceremony will be held on March 31.