Lakeside Book Company, the U.S.’s biggest book manufacturer, just got even bigger with the acquisition of Bradford & Bigelow (B&B), Publishers Weekly writes. B&B’s facilities and teams will stay as they are, and it will operate as a division of Lakeside. “B&B excels at delivering exceptional printed educational materials and we intend to build upon their nearly eight decades of investment in technology, sustainability, and customer-focused workflows to serve new customers in education and other markets,” Dave McCree, the chief executive of Lakeside, is quoted saying.

Late last week, on its final day of operations, Catapult settled on a termination agreement with its employee union, according to Publishers Lunch. “Every union member will get at least ten weeks severance and COBRA health insurance premiums paid for through the end of the year,” Katy Hershberger writes. “Employees who have worked at the company for more than a year will get a minimum of twelve weeks of severance.” The buyer of Catapult’s assets has not yet been revealed, including to members of the union.

The U.K.’s Association of Illustrators (AOI) recently found that nearly half of the 549 illustrators the organization surveyed this year have lost work because a client chose to use generative AI instead, the Bookseller reports. 62 percent also said they had been sent AI-generated images as part of briefs or mood boards from clients including book publishers, and over a third had been asked to copy or refine AI-generated images. “AI is replacing commissions in some areas, reshaping briefs and fees in others, moving illustrators further down the creative process and affecting some groups more heavily than others. This survey gives us a benchmark for tracking those changes, identifying where pressure is greatest, challenging poor practice and testing claims about responsible AI against the experience of working illustrators,” the AOI report concludes. “It also underlines a point that can get lost in discussions about technology: Illustration is not simply an output. The ideas, research, judgement, experience, and individual creative voice behind the work have significant value, too.”

For Literary Hub, Maris Kreizman parses the concept of the “make book,” a book that publishers decide to try to make into a success even if the writer behind the work isn’t yet a household name. Examples that worked might include Viet Than Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015) or Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep (Random House, 2005). “The make book requires a number of conditions in order to work,” Kreizman explains, “a publisher willing to risk the time and effort of their staff on a book that is not a slam dunk, a wider company ethos that values the making of art, the ability of publishing workers to trust their instincts to determine if a book is special, and, most importantly, a trust in the market to elevate worthy literary material.” These days, many of these conditions are hardly a given.

Allison K. Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, has put out a letter stressing the many likely disruptions facing the supply chain as we head into the holiday season. These include the closing of a major U.S. book component printer, new Canadian tariffs, and shipping issues thanks to rising fuel prices caused by the U.S.-Iran war. What’s more, Hill adds, because book distributor Baker & Taylor has gone out of business, Ingram will be further strained. “Ingram actively improves their operations every year and they are coming into this season with a couple of much appreciated improvements. Even so they will be challenged to keep up with the demand—at least one publisher is already actively telling booksellers to order from Ingram instead of direct, more publishers are sending more books to Ingram for print on demand in anticipation of the challenges this season, and there are five hundred more independent bookstores than there were this time last year,” Hill writes. “To mitigate risks for booksellers, publishers have advised them to order early and order more, but cash flow makes this a challenge, as does the unpredictability of how much customers will be able or willing to spend in this challenging economy.”

The Poetry Foundation has awarded over $1.5 million in grant funding to fifty-two nonprofit poetry organizations, presses, magazines, and more. The grantees are based in twenty-three states and U.S. territories and support poets at every stage of their careers. “Support for the literary arts, and especially poetry, remains critical at this time of rising costs and a decrease in funding from traditional sources,” Poetry Foundation president and chief executive Michelle T. Boone is quoted saying. “The Poetry Foundation’s funding to this collective of organizations and publishers helps make it possible for people of all ages to express themselves and engage with poetry and poets.”

The Association of American Publishers, the Independent Book Publishers Association, and several other publishing groups have jointly filed an amicus brief supporting the author and publisher plaintiffs in a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, Publishers Weekly reports. Last month, the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs asked the court to grant summary judgment in favor of dismissing the claim that the defendants’ use of copyrighted materials qualifies as fair use. “Overly expansive interpretations of fair use displace the market mechanisms Congress established, replacing negotiated exchange with uncompensated use and transferring value from the authors and publishers that invest in them to industries that neither incurred the costs nor assumed the risks of producing the underlying works,” the amicus brief states.

For the Guardian, journalist Snigdha Poonam investigates who exactly is behind all of the scams targeting writers today. Recently, more and more authors have reported that they’ve received invitations to Zoom book clubs that turn out not to exist, offers to help with publishing or marketing books, and more, only to be told that in order to avail themselves of these opportunities they will need to pay. But while these operations may seem bot-driven, in at least some cases there are real people at the helm. An employee for one scam group told Poonam that this work underscored how easily manipulable writers, especially Americans, can be. “People in the U.S. are very nice, they’re very good-hearted people. They trust you. Whatever you’re saying, they trust you. That’s the problem,” the employee is quoted saying. And because these people earned their income in dollars, the scammers had few qualms about preying on them. “Generally, the mentality was: When you’re making income in dollars, you have a stable life, you have sustainability. So that’s what they did. They just ripped people off.”

The Independent Publishers Caucus has released the Independent Press Top 40 best-seller lists for the week ending October 25, 2026. The lists, in fiction and nonfiction, are compiled in partnership with the American Booksellers Association and identify “the top titles from independent presses as represented at independent bookstores across the U.S.” This week on the fiction list, The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (Spiegel & Grau) once more retains the top spot. New to the fiction list are The Italian Obsession (House of Ferrara) (Arndell) by T L Swan, at no. 21; The Land in Winter (Europa Editions) by Andrew Miller, at no. 22; and Glass, Irony and God (New Directions) by Anne Carson, at no. 40.

Library Journal surveyed 868 recent MLIS graduates from twenty-eight different programs around the country and found that many are sticking with jobs they had before or during their time in school, prioritizing stability over advancement. The three most common workplaces among those surveyed were public libraries, college and university libraries, and the private industry. Despite changes in information services in recent years, nearly half of the surveyed graduates with full-time jobs said that reference and information services were their primary jub responsibility. And many have seen their pre-MLIS skills retain some use. “In my state, there is an oversaturation of MLIS graduates, so entry-level librarian jobs are difficult to get into,” one respondent said. “Having a good foundation of experience in other jobs has helped with some of the skills needed to beat the competition.”

The independent publisher Apateon Press has said that it will help authors whose books have gone out of print republish and sell those titles on Amazon, according to Publishers Weekly. The program is free; authors will not receive later chargebacks and will receive 15 percent royalties on gross sales based on Amazon’s retail price. “Authors who have regained rights to their titles, previously self-published a book and wish to bring it back to market, or have a backlist of titles they would like to make available again are eligible to take part in the service,” Jim Milliot writes.

From January 2024 to October 2025, Macmillan encouraged its employees to use an in-house AI chatbot called No Ordinary Assistant (NOA), WIRED reports. Workers at the company were told that NOA could hallucinate and needed to be fact-checked but were also assured that it was safe to input proprietary information. Many authors view the creep of AI in the publishing world as ironic in light of the fact that some of the country’s biggest publishers are also suing some of the leading AI companies for copyright infringement. One said it is “frustrating to watch publishers get these massive settlements [from] AI companies and then embrace AI to do their work,” adding that “[i]t feels like they’re feeding at both sides of the trough.”

For the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Gamerman talks to the voice actors tasked with bringing the characters of Sarah J. Maas’s wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses books to life via audiobook. The latest book in the series, A Court of Splintered Harmony was published today by Bloomsbury. A traditional audiobook is available now, but fans who are willing to hold out will also be able to enjoy a full-cast version of the audiobook made by the production company Graphic Audio in December. Making this kind of recording is not without its challenges. “Bringing the sounds of this world to life isn’t easy,” Gamerman explains. “The metallic clang of sharp claws should evoke mythic combat, not knife prep at a roast beef station. Performers aim to match the emotion of the books. For intimate scenes, actors make some embellishments, including kissing a hand into the microphone.”

Simon & Schuster imprint One Signal expedited the release of Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East by Matthew Cole by two days following the publication of an explosive excerpt in Vanity Fair, according to Publishers Lunch. The excerpt contained allegations that when Kushner was working in the White House during President Trump’s first term, Middle Eastern leaders paid him large sums of money in order to sway U.S. policy. “Any efforts [Kushner] made to shape U.S. policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power,” Cole writes in the excerpt. “U.S. law requires citizens who lobby on behalf of a foreign power to declare themselves and the country they are working on behalf of to the Justice Department.” Kushner has denied these allegations.

Chris Haughton and Nicola Davies, the children’s literature laureates for Ireland and Wales, respectively, have both said that they will donate royalties from their works to Sally Rooney in solidarity, the Guardian reports. These decisions come on the heels of the news that Rooney’s works will no longer be sold in the U.K. because of her pledge to support the group Palestine Action, which has been banned by the British government. “As authors, we need to be focused on freedom of expression, this is everything we’re about, and this is just showing solidarity with an author who has bravely spoken out,” Haughton is quoted saying. “The entire situation is just a farce. Sending Sally Rooney the money adds another level of absurdity to this absurd situation, it’s making a mockery of the law.”

GQ magazine spoke to thirty-four people across the world of book publishing to get a sense of the “state of books” in America in 2026. The people surveyed agree that the publishing world as we once knew it is gone, but things aren’t all doom and gloom. New opportunities for writers to strike out on their own are materializing. Readers are finding community in unexpected places. As author and reading podcast host LeVar Burton points out, “The act of reading, and how we perceive readers, has changed. What was once seen as a solitary act has become a social one. Through platforms like BookTok, Bookstagram, and Substack, the reader is no longer a lone figure in an armchair. Now, they’re part of a vibrant and visible community.”

The Authors Guild has joined a slew of other organizations in calling on the Australian government to change its copyright law to allow AI companies to train their models on authors’ works without permission. “The legislation would make it legal for your work to be exploited by AI companies, if they conducted that exploitation on Australian soil,” the Guild wrote in a statement. “It would effectively preempt the lawsuits authors have brought against AI companies and our lobbying for protections since the AI companies would simply move their training operations to Australia while continuing to deploy the models in the U.S.” Those interested in signing on to this statement can do so on the Guild’s website.

Short stories may be a tough sell in the world of publishing, but they’re proving popular in Hollywood, the New York Times reports. In recent years studios like Universal and Amazon MGM have purchased short stories for seven-figure sums. Executives facing piles of scripts are happy to read shorter work, and adapting unpublished short fiction can be easier than optioning a novel. “It’s such a good starting place rather than a completed blueprint,” Addison Duffy, an agent at United Talent Agency, said. “Producers, writers, and studios feel like they can help mold and shape it.”

Trends come and go at the pace of the internet, which means that publishers must figure out how to balance meeting the market with taking the time required to produce a physical book, USA Today writes. Between all the additional tasks on their plates and the many hurdles of the production process, rushing a book out can be a challenge. But while it may seem like audiences’ appetites are ever-changing, some in the industry point out that they’re actually more likely to get sick of a trend before readers do. “[Jessica] Faust[, the chief executive and founder of BookEnds Literary Agency,] offered an example where a hypothetical reader might discover a mermaid novel, while agents have already seen fifty manuscripts about mermaids.” Josh Rivera explains. “Publishers may have bought several before readers see the first.”

The Minnesota Star Tribune has taken a closer look at one small school in the town of Cook which has banned more books from its library than every other public school in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and North and South Dakota combined, despite the fact that the state has banned book bans. The North Woods School in Cook pulled eighty books on subjects ranging from the Holocaust to dinosaurs, written by authors including Native American writers and Newbery Award-winners. Every book they pulled was added to the school’s collection at the request of a new library assistant named Quinn Krebsbach, who has since been fired. Krebsbach told that Star Tribune that his efforts, which included a display on banned books to mark Banned Book Week last year, were meant to “hopefully educate students a little bit about book challenges and intellectual freedom.” The superintendent of the school district said that the district is creating a policy for library materials, which was not in place when all of these books were pulled from shelves last year, and is working with the state education department and legal counsel to resolve the situation.