One in five parents and carers are spending less on books for their children because of the cost-of-living crisis, and a quarter have asked children to borrow more books from the school library, new research has found.
For an increasing number of people, reading means listening to streamed audio files through a smartphone. The audiobook has a long history,1 of course, but what is new is its commercial impact: For the first time, audiobooks can no longer be seen as a niche market. Read more
For months, a group of writers calling themselves Authors United have campaigned, mostly unsuccessfully, against the business practices of Amazon.com. Read more
After a decade of closures, independent booksellers are optimistic they can turn the page on a story of decline as they launch a festival of 24-hour "readathons", live story-writing and numerous book signings this weekend. Read more
We're going to go out on a limb here and make a sweeping prediction, one that hopefully will be ridiculed in fifty years: consumers do not buy books directly from the publisher. Why not? Because in most cases, they don't know who the publisher is. In even more dire news for publishers, consumers also don't care who the publisher is.
In an effort to increase holiday sales, which have fallen for the last two seasons, Barnes & Noble is hoping to lure customers into stores this Black Friday with something book lovers cannot download: signed copies. Read more
Adobe has issued a proclamation that starting in July, the vast majority of e-reader apps and hardware devices will not be able to read purchased eBooks anymore. Read more
‘I always quote Kurt Vonnegut. He said in the early part of his career he was dismissed as a science fiction writer and that critics tend to put genre books, including sci-fi, in the bottom drawer of their desk... It's true. I get the New York Times every Sunday. In 37 novels, I've never had a stand-alone review. I'm always in the crime round-up.
A survey of 787 members of the Society of Authors (SoA) has found that a third of translators and a quarter of illustrators have lost work to generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Translators are also more likely to use AI to support their work, with 37% of respondents saying they have done so, followed by 25% of non-fiction writers.
The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children's book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
I launched my podcast Making It Up nearly three years ago with the goal of interviewing writers not for any particular work of theirs, but to talk to them about their lives. I didn't want to ask them what famous author they want to have dinner with or what their top five favorite books are ... yech. Read more
Until we have a mechanism to test for artificial intelligence, writers need a tool to maintain trust in their work. So I decided to be completely open with my readers