Decisions, Decisions

The Supreme Court issued two major decisions today with implications for the book business, allowing parents to opt children out of lessons on books with LGBTQ+ themes in public schools and approving federal subsidies for universal broadband access in public schools and libraries. After a long search, the American Library Association has found its next executive director—and just in time for its annual conference, which kicked off today in Philadelphia. And as Pride Month wraps up, we took a look at how indie booksellers across the country are bolstering their Pride displays with banned books. On the heels of big wins for Meta and Anthropic, Microsoft is now the latest tech firm to be sued by a group of authors—including Kai Bird and Jia Tolentino—over the use of pirated versions of their books to train its AI, per Reuters. The Trump administration has terminated millions of dollars in contracts with scientific publishing giant Springer Nature, reports Axios. In Lit Hub, dozens of authors including Jasmine Guillory, Ali Hazelwood, Emily Henry, Colleen Hoover, R.F. Kuang, and Lauren Groff have penned an open letter to their publishers asking them to employ specific guardrails around the use of AI. Vox wonders if the decline of reading has negatively affected our politics, and the New Yorker considers how AI is changing the way we think. And young adult author Susan Beth Pfeffer and veteran journalist Bill Moyers have died at 77 and 91, respectively.