A Soft Start

Book sales slipped ever so slightly in the first half of 2025, with Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series continuing to be a top seller even as romantasy’s grip on the market loosens. We stopped by this year’s Parix Audio Day conference in Madrid, where audiobook experts and executives weighed in on the future of the format. The Southern Festival of Books, whose future was recently imperiled by slashed federal funding for the humanities, will return this fall. TikTok is building a new version of its platform for U.S. users ahead of the planned sale of the app, reports the Information. PEN Ukraine’s book warehouse has been damaged by a Russian missile strike, according to the organization. The Bookseller reports on a new AI fiction translation service just launched by two U.K. publishing veterans. Also in the U.K., the author of The Salt Path—which sold more than two million copies and got a star-studded film adaptation—has been accused of fabricating parts of her bestselling memoir, per the BBC. The Guardian talks with children’s authors who are raising the alarm about the recent Supreme Court decision allowing parents to opt their kids out of reading LGBTQ+ books. And Slate unpacks how letting AI do our writing for us is threatening our ability to think critically.