Since MIT Press shifted to an open-access publishing model in 2021, “changing the entire business model behind producing and distributing” its books, it has seen more engagement with its titles from a broader audience. Inside Higher Ed unpacks the business strategy and what it might mean for other university and small presses.

In the Atlantic Lily Meyer considers the life of Judith Jones, whose storied career at Knopf—where she rescued The Diary of Anne Frank from the slush pile and edited acclaimed literary writers like John Updike and cookbook author Julia Child—is the subject of a new book by Sara B. Franklin, The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, published today by Atria Books.

NPR digs into the environmental impact of reading and whether print or digital books are better for the planet. “It’s not cut and dried,” Mike Berners-Lee, a British sustainability professor, tells reporter Chloe Veltman.

Maggie Nelson’s cult favorite poetry collection, Bluets, has been adapted for a stage production. The New York Times reviews the show at the Royal Court Theater in London, where the show is running through June 29.

The Paris Review offers a peek inside Alice Munro’s notebooks.

On Literary Hub James Folta weighs in on a recent report about AI’s transformation of the media landscape and its implications for workers in book publishing. “This entire report makes clear to me that the powers that be see AI as a way to make more money by squeezing down their cost of labor.”

The Silent Book Club movement is going strong, with more than one thousand chapters in fifty countries gathering for quiet reading sessions, according to a recent announcement. Read about the rise of the Silent Book Club in Poets & Writers Magazine.

Book Riot offers an overview of states demonizing the American Library Association because of its stance against book banning and how they are thwarting local libraries and their staff from associating with the organization.

Publishers Weekly reports from the U.S. Book Show, an annual publishing conference hosted by the magazine and the Association of American Literary Agents, which took place Wednesday in New York City.

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most famous narratives of fugitivity from slavery in the United States. Now her brother’s story of escape has been published for the first time in nearly one hundred seventy years by the University of Chicago Press, reports the New York Times:  John Swanson Jacobs’s The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots: A True Story of Slavery; A Rediscovered Narrative, With a Full Biography.

The Associated Press offers a peek inside Madrid’s Caja de las Letras, or Letter Box, a project of the Cervantes Institute that stores Spanish literary and other cultural artifacts in the old safe of the Banco Español del Río de la Plata, which is open to the public.

The New Yorker reports on how Minneapolis Central Library has welcomed homeless patrons at a time when homelessness has been on the rise nationwide. “The police regularly clear the city’s streets of encampments, but officers don’t run unhoused people out of Central. As long as they follow the rules, any patron—and everyone at the library is called a patron—can stay all day, every day.”

The New York Times interviews Paul Yamazaki, the chief buyer for City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco. “At City Lights we see a growing enthusiasm, particularly among younger readers (from my perspective, anyone under 40), for printed matter.”

PBS offers a report from inside “Seattle’s burgeoning community of literary translators.” 

Interview magazine features a conversation between author Chelsea Hodson and Ashleah Gonzales, multimedia star Kendall Jenner’s modeling agent. Gonzales this week published a book of poetry, Fake Piñata and Other Poems, with Hodson’s indie press, Rose Books. Gonzales is also apparently responsible for Jenner’s emergence as a “literary it-girl,” curating the Kardashian kin member’s library: “In the summer of 2019, every other paparazzi shot of the supermodel featured a hot alt-lit title as accessory.”

In the New Yorker Anthony Lane considers Blinkest, an app that compresses full-length books into “micro-synopses” for those who value “knowledge management” over the pleasures of leisurely reading.

A tale in Stephen King’s latest story collection—You Like It Darker, published this week—took the horror master forty-five years to complete. “What happens with me is I will write stories and they don’t always get done," King tells NPR. “And the ones that don’t get done go in a drawer and I forget all about them.”

The New Yorker considers a new podcast series called Not All Propaganda Is Art, which unpacks how the “CIA turned writers into operatives” during the Cold War.

PEN America has published remarks by its president, author Jenny Finney Boylan, at the free speech organization’s annual fundraising gala last week. Boylan addressed the ongoing controversy over PEN America’s response to the war in Gaza, which led PEN to cancel its annual literary festival and awards ceremony. “To our critics I want to say that we hear you, and we want to move forward with you, together. We are determined to amplify the voices of all writers at risk—from Israel to Ukraine, from Palestine to Russia, from Florida to Texas.” The gala reportedly raised more than $2 million.

A report on AI’s “transformative effects” on media finds that AI has already affected or will likely affect three aspects of the book industry: content creation, editing, and sales and marketing, reports Publishers Weekly. “Publishers including Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan Education are partnering with such technology providers as OpenAI, Jasper, and Google.”