Links of the week February 17 2025 (08)

Barnett is the Library of Congress

The national library of the United States, which offers a massive amount of information easily available, including details about copyright registration. http://lcweb.loc.gov/homepage/lchp.html

' newest National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. The position was established in 2008 to promote books and reading to kids across the country. Other authors who've held the post include Jacqueline Woodson, Jason Reynolds and Meg Medina. It's a 2-year term and everyone who does it gets to pick a different focus. Barnett's plan is to focus on picture books. Sponsor 

"The picture book is my favorite art form," he said. "It's such an incredible, vibrant, exciting, forward-looking, experimental art form. And I think it's really undervalued, too."

What do Jodi Picoult, Anne Frank and Judy Blume have in common with Khaled Hosseini and Toni Morrison? Captain Underpants with Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses? They are all subject to book bans in America.

The bans affect schools, colleges and public libraries, and have been gaining traction since 2021 - putting what PENSupported by eminent writers, this is the English branch of International Pen, which has centres in nearly 100 countries. It fights for freedom of expression and against political censorship. It campaigns for writers harassed, imprisoned and sometimes murdered for their views. http://www.englishpen.org/ America calls the 'freedom to read' of students in jeopardy.

The trajectory of the censorial trend is upwards. PEN America reported 10,046 instances of book bans during the 2023-24 school year, with over 4,000 unique titles removed from shelves. 3,362 books were banned in the school year 2023-23; 2,532 in 2021-22.

Florida has the dubious honour of leading the way, with 4,000-5,000 banned titles; closely followed by Iowa (3,000-4,000) and Texas (500-600), but the bans extend across many of the 50 states. Only 19 states are entirely free of book bans (at the time of writing).

 

No one can ignore the tumultuous shifts happening across the internet and their implications for fostering online community within the publishing industry. In recent months, major changes to platforms such as X, updates to Meta policies (which will impact Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), and the uncertain future of TikTok have many users reconsidering which online spaces to show up to, or whether to show up at all. For the children's publishing industry, which is in the midst of its own social media shuffle, this means finding new places for the kid lit community to thrive.

At X, the shifts have included the implementation of paid subscriptions, and most notably the replacement of third-party fact checking with "community notes" edited by users on the platform. The vibe shift had been looming: "Twitter grew increasingly toxic and combative in the years leading up to the 2016 election," says author-illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka, and users began to leave in droves as X owner Elon Musk forged closer ties with Donald Trump in the run up to the 2024 election.

 

A statement released at the conclusion of the summit affirmed the main priorities of the attendees:

• Promoting AI accessibility to reduce digital divides
• Ensuring AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure and trustworthy, taking into account international frameworks for all
• Making innovation in AI thrive by enabling conditions for its development and avoiding market concentration driving industrial recovery and development
• Encouraging AI deployment that positively shapes the future of work and labor markets and delivers opportunity for sustainable growth
• Making AI sustainable for people and the planet
• Reinforcing international cooperation to promote coordination in international governance

 

January was a long month, but we finally have some good news in 2025: Bookseller Barnes & Noble plans to open at least 60 new stores this year, topping last year's record of 57 stores and marking a steady revival of its brick-and-mortar bookstores across the country.

"[Barnes & Noble] is experiencing strong sales in its existing stores and has been opening many new stores after more than 15 years of declining store numbers," the company told Fast Company. "In 2024, Barnes & Noble opened more new bookstores in a single year than it had in the whole decade from 2009 to 2019 . . . [The company] is enjoying a period of tremendous growth as the strategy to hand control of each bookstore to its local booksellers has proven so successful."

As Fast Company previously reported, after more than a decade of shuttering locations, ultimately closing 150 locations, the chain started ramping up again in 2023 with some 30 new stores.

 

"It's a way to bring all of our crime fiction together," said publisher Morgan Entrekin, pointing out that crime fiction accounts for 20% to 25% of Grove Atlantic's total backlist. "It's time."

Describing himself as a longtime avid reader of the genre, Entrekin recalled that he initially published "only a handful" of crime novels after Grove and Atlantic Monthly presses merged in 1993. The press began ramping up its crime fiction offerings in 2003, after becoming Donna Leon's publisher and acquiring the rights to the first three volumes in her Guido Brunetti series, which were originally published by HarperCollins.

"The market had shifted;" Entrekin recalled. "Rather than using the old model of building an author over a number of books, the Big Six at the time were getting into auctions for six-figure, seven-figure advances, and launching the first book, or in a multiple-book contract, the first two or three books, in a big way. If it worked, they'd go forward; if it didn't, they'd give up on the author. I saw an opportunity there, to try to pick up some of these authors."

 

I spent many decades in journalism, most of that time for Newsday on Long Island. I covered criminal trials, town beats, and spent several years on the newspaper's acclaimed Investigations Team.
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For most of those years working as a reporter, and later an editor, my goal was to find a crime with enough layers and details that would enable me to write a true-crime book. Like so many journalists, I found In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote, to be a masterpiece of this genre. Could I find something that could even come close to this book?

I found what I was looking for in the 1980s with the murder of Roy Radin, a Southampton, N.Y., businessman who went to Hollywood to produce a movie, got in with a group of cocaine dealers, and was brutally murdered. I covered the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the crime, which led me to another murder in Okeechobee, Florida, and I later covered the trial of the defendants who had murdered Radin.

 

Dear authors, creatives and those still unsure about calling themselves writers, It%u2019s News For Emerging Authors time again. Let%u2019s all collectively look back at the previous month like it%u2019s a crystal ball that could tell us our futures if we just squint hard enough and really believe. However, if you%u2019re constantly keeping an eye on the book charts, it probably feels like there is more of the same to come, and in some senses you might be right. So thank goodness you%u2019re here with your new ideas and manuscripts that are about to challenge the status quo. Or maybe you have a quiet book that%u2019s ready to make someone think differently about their life? Either way, change is afoot %u2013 and I%u2019m not talking about the almost hourly updates of shock and nonsense that are coming at us from across the pond.