Books Mark as Read The Book News Isn’t All Bad Some bookish headlines can be dire — but it’s important to note the good stuff, too.  By Molly Templeton | Published on April 16, 2026 “A Lady Reading a Newspaper” by Carl Larsson (1886) Comment 0 Share New Share “A Lady Reading a Newspaper” by Carl Larsson (1886) Did you hear? No one reads books anymore. Well, not unless they’re reading performatively. All books are going to be written by AI soon, so why fight it? Who even reads, what with our broken attention spans and endless scrolls? Bookstores died a long time ago! Publishing is over! That’s what it feels like, sometimes, reading headlines about books. Dire. It feels dire. And these bookish news breaks are small potatoes compared to the multiple existential crises going on, today, on so many fronts that I cannot possibly list them.  But it isn’t all bad, over here in book-land. It isn’t! Book sales are up. People are reading. Book banning bills are failing (sometimes). Writers are pushing back on the narrative of the inevitability of AI. I went looking for good book news, and I found so much I had to stop looking, lest the task consume my entire week.  So I wrote it up for you. And yet I feel compelled to offer a caveat: None of this is to say that there aren’t terrible things happening everywhere, including in this bookish corner of the world. AI is a mess on too many fronts to count. Publishers keep consolidating, laying off staff while demanding more of those who still have jobs. Book bans are a very real threat.  Still. It’s important to note the good stuff, too.  People Are Actually Reading Books Every time I see a headline about whether or not people read, it’s doomy. No one reads! No one reads enough, or the right things! But people are actually reading. According to a Pew Research Center study from earlier this month, “Overall, 75% of U.S. adults say they have read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months.” There are some other neat stats in there—most people read print, though the balance is shifting; few people are participating in book clubs—but the fact remains: people are reading. Yes, 25 percent of Americans said they read no books in the last year. But 14 percent said they read 20 books or more. Do I wish that number were higher? Sure! But it’s not nothing.  Book Sales Back Up the Fact that People Are Reading Books This one is good and also frustrating: According to Publishers Weekly, “For the second consecutive year, unit sales of print books were up at outlets that report to Circana BookScan, hitting 762.4 million in 2025 for the year ended Dec. 27, 2025. That marks a 0.3% increase over 2024, which in turn saw sales grow 0.5% over 2023.” Those aren’t huge increases, but they are increases. And yet we keep seeing publishing contract. One possible reason for this (PW again): “Since sales peaked in 2021 at 839.7 million copies, they have settled at levels higher than before the pandemic, though not as high as many publishers had hoped.” I say this with intense, fervent hope: It’s never going to be the pandemic year again. And publishers have got to be a little more practical than to expect sales like that year after year. Interestingly, fantasy sales fell, but romance sales rose. If only BookScan had a romantasy category! Book Workers Are Forming Unions At this point, the only big five publisher with a union is HarperCollins. As that union’s website says, “Collective bargaining gives us a democratic voice in improving our lives and helps us protect our jobs.”  But other book workers are, well, working on it: Employees at Catapult just announced the formation of the Catapult Workers Collective. On Instagram, they wrote, “The goal of our union is to protect the wages and benefits of our workplace, to affirm the dignity and value of our labor, and to advance just and sustainable practices in our industry. We’re immensely proud of what we do, but little is guaranteed for employees without a union.” Workers at the American Library Association have also formed a union. In response, the ALA’s executive director said the organization “will engage in this process thoughtfully and in good faith.” Indie Bookstores Are Flourishing “In 2025 alone,” says a piece at Fast Company, “422 new bookstores opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.” The year before that, 323 bookstores opened. I am old enough to remember when independent bookstores were declared dead. I am deeply glad that the reports of their demise were exaggerated. We can order anything online. Many people do. But many people have also realized that bookstores are community spaces, resources, events hubs, and so much more. As Fast Company notes, “Independent bookstores have made a sense of community core to their identity.”  That was especially on display earlier this year, when Minnesota indies joined in the protests against ICE. This community support expanded beyond Minneapolis: I can’t tell you how many posts I saw across different social networks, encouraging readers to order from these stores as they did everything they could to support their neighbors. Publishers Keep Starting New Imprints Okay, so this one’s a little inside baseball, but it still seems like a good thing to me: A lot of publishers started a lot of new imprints last year! That includes Simon & Schuster’s horror imprint, 12:01 Books, and Tor’s catchall imprint, Wildthorn. In 2024, Hachette started its own horror imprint, Run for It, and in 2023 Tor added the romance-focused Bramble.  It’s always interesting to see the focus of new imprints, which pretty clearly reflect where publishers think there’s money to be made. And while it doesn’t go into the “good stuff” tally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s also recently been a huge loss, imprint-wise, as Farrar, Straus & Giroux opted to shutter MCD, the imprint that launched a ton of nifty-sized paperbacks (and much more!), including Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach books.  Books Are Everywhere On Screen I don’t have to tell you this one. Who doesn’t know about Heated Rivalry, by this point? And while I may personally be exhausted of trips to Westeros, the George R.R. Martin cinematic universe shows no signs of slowing. Rebecca Yarros’ blockbuster book series is in development as a TV series. A Dungeon Crawler Carl series is coming. The trailer for The Sheep Detectives is a thousand times more charming than it needed to be. When Hollywood isn’t busy adapting video games, it’s adapting books. Are they always the ones we want to see adapted? Nope! I still hold that if we can spend this much time and money in Westeros, we can at least visit the Six Duchies. Maybe someday. But still: adaptations are booming. And a lot of them are romantasy. AI Is Not Inevitable I have simply lost track of the number of times I have side-eyed the New York Times over their coverage of AI and books. A recent newsletter used the tiresome word “inevitable.” Listen: Nothing about the thing we’re calling AI—I really prefer to put it in scare quotes, but I know that gets annoying—is inevitable. People make choices, and a lot of people are choosing not to engage with this intensely questionable tech. Every time a new “AI is here to stay and here’s how it’s ruining publishing” article comes out, authors take to social media to decry it, and to say they’re not using it.  Some of them have gone a step further: LitHub has an article from Sarah Hall, who put a “human written” stamp on her newest novel, Helm. Hall writes, “From those first hand-scrawled sentences to the final dementing rearrangement of commas, my books are very humanly made: proudly, imperfectly, with difficulty and with tremendous care. They are felt as they are composed, painfully, joyously, cellularly—and they are designed for other biological beings to experience, to connect with, to be animated, provoked and moved by.” AI is not inevitable.  Dolly Parton Remains a Force for Good Imagine what the world might be like if more rich people were interested in things like giving free books to every Indiana kid under 5. Readers Keep Funding Writing and Criticism Last week, the Ancillary Review of Books launched a fundraiser—and met their initial goal under an hour. This is great for them, and for SFF criticism. It’s also not a huge shock if you look at the fundraising efforts of some of the genre’s other magazines: In 2024, Uncanny raised more than double their goal. They then aimed high in 2025, and more than met that goal, too. Strange Horizons also regularly beat their goals by miles. I find this all very heartening, and a sign that people are not only reading books; they’re also reading short fiction, and criticism, and analysis, and commentary—all from a variety of sources. It’s a really, really hard time for critics, journalists, fiction writers, anyone who works with words. Community fundraising might not be the ideal way to keep publications afloat, but when it works? That’s a good thing. Book Bans Are Dire, But They Can Still Fail Florida just defeated not one but three book banning bills. Florida! If you look at the American Library Association’s adverse legislation tracker, you’ll see quite a few book banning bills that never made it into law.  There are still more of these attempts being made, all over the country. PEN America called the banning attempts of the last four years “unprecedented and undeniable.” Most Americans oppose book bans, but also, most of us just don’t do anything about it. Now, with a troubling book-banning bill in the House, would be a really good time to speak up. (It’s also almost Right to Read Day! That’s on April 20th. Kind of a funny day for it.) More good news, though, on this front: We Need Diverse Books recently launched a new initiative, the Unbanned Books Network, which plans to choose 20 classrooms across the country, “in communities heavily affected by book bans,” and give them each around 100 banned titles (and a library cart to hold all those books!).  Translated Literature is Having a Great Moment This year, the Locus Awards include a category for translated novels—and the top ten is a banger list. And the Center for the Art of Translation just announced a massive new project to open a literary and cultural center in San Francisco. It will include the West Coast’s only all-translated-literature bookstore, host events, be a resource, and generally just be awesome. If you don’t read a ton of SFF in translation, that’s understandable; it can be hard to come by. Which is exactly they the Locus Award spotlight is so necessary. There’s an entire globe of speculative fiction out there that those of us who only read English can’t access—until it’s been translated. There are also probably a lot of authors who could benefit from being introduced to the English-speaking book market. It’s win-win for readers and writers if we get more work in translation into US bookshops. For one thing, we need all the perspectives we can get.[end-mark] The post The Book News Isn’t All Bad appeared first on Reactor.