HarperCollins didn't license its way into manga — it bought Kazé France and Kazé Germany and turned them into the pipeline. 5–8 titles in 2027, 25–30 a year by 2029. Translated fiction doesn't move because it's good.

Format split across 3,950 direct orders of my thriller: paperback 46%, audiobook 27.5%, ebook 26.5%. Ukraine gets described as a print market with a small digital tail. In my data, audio outsells ebook — consistently.

850 copies of my novel went to libraries — 500 regional, 350 inside military units. Three months of silence came first. Institutional distribution runs on named people, not on programmes, and the programme is what you find when you search.

Russia struck Nova Poshta warehouses near Kyiv — three times in a row, the second and third missiles hitting while firefighters were already fighting the flames. Books from Kyiv publishers, waiting to reach readers, burned. So did the entire print run of my book "Liquid Cube" — 1,000 copies.

Andrea Bartz, lead plaintiff in Bartz v. Anthropic over books used to train AI, has sold Ballantine a new novel: “Delete Your Account.” A writer asks a chatbot for a thriller as good as her favorite book and ends up trapped in the pages of the original. Out May 11, 2027.

Estonia's 2025 numbers: 1.976m copies printed, down 6.5%, and 2,883 titles against 3,098 the year before. Children's print volume fell by more than a fifth. Shorter lists mean each remaining slot is a bigger bet — which is why proof of demand travels better than enthusiasm.

Tonies posted €242.9m in H1 2026, up 38%, with North America up 48% and 63% of revenue now coming from outside German-speaking markets.

Shueisha is putting ~400 manga titles into 100+ languages, with about 300 reaching English for the first time. New chapters arrive two to three weeks after the Japanese release, not two years. Translation here is a distribution decision, not a prestige one.

Ukraine’s entire book market is worth about $210M a year — 15,069 titles, 33 million copies.  Russia destroyed 9.65 million of those copies in three months this summer. UAH 1.19 billion in losses. Independence Day, 35 years. The books keep being printed anyway.

Pomerantsev's argument: modern propaganda does not sell you a lie, it wears out your belief that truth is reachable. Right about the effect, described from outside the door. Inside it is an open-plan office with shift quotas and a scoreboard. Nihilism is a mood. A workplace with targets is a plot.

US regional indie bookseller associations are growing fast: Midwest IBA +102 stores since July 2025, Mountains and Plains +128, SIBA +115 — a quarter to a third of their membership is new. Not a shrinking network. A growing one, moving upstream into early discovery.

HarperCollins hired Amazon's books vendor services lead as VP of online and digital sales. Scott Sanders ran Amazon's relationships with the Big Five. Now he sits on the publisher's side of that table. Publishers aren't hiring a sales VP. They're buying platform literacy.

Frankfurt Rights now half-automates translation licensing for print and ebook — invoicing and contract included. AI licensing is still negotiated case by case. Commodity rights get infrastructure; contested rights get lawyers. The admin cost, not the advance, is what killed small-language deals.

Ingram's Covered opened to booksellers and librarians this week. Free digital review copies, with catalog and ordering to follow. The same company already prints the book, warehouses it, ships it and takes the order. Now it also hosts the room where buyers decide.

UK print sales crossed £1bn six days earlier than last year — earliest in BookScan’s comparable records. Value up 2.3%. Reader demand for print isn’t the industry’s constraint. Discovery is. The money is there earlier every year; the question is which books ever get in front of it.

Carlsen, Marc-Uwe Kling and Astrid Henn sued OpenAI in Munich over “Das NEINhorn” — ChatGPT allegedly produced whole print-ready copies, fake ISBN and publisher logo included.

A former bookseller launched Lit Circle: a free listing of author events, book clubs and festivals, with local alerts. BandsInTown for books. Built because local press died and algorithms now decide who sees your event announcement. Production isn’t the bottleneck in publishing. Discovery is.

Poland: the writers’ union wants a legal minimum royalty of 10% of cover price. The Culture Ministry backs it. Median author income is ~€580/month, below the minimum wage of ~€820. Contracts at 5% — and even 2% — exist.

Börsenblatt asked two German children's and YA editors — Arctis and Hanser — what editing actually does to a manuscript. One answer: sometimes the Instagram-ready metaphor has to be cut. Not because it's bad. Because it does nothing for the story.

Sweden spent 15 years putting a screen on every desk. It's now spending 2.1bn kronor putting printed textbooks back on them. PISA 2022: nearly a quarter of Swedish 15–16 year olds below basic reading comprehension. Preschool screen mandate: dropped. School phone ban: July 2026.

A debut novel took #1 in the UK this week. 3,642 copies → 14,596. +300.8%. The spike came from FairyLoot — a subscription box. Readers who paid months in advance, all counted in a single week. Not retail placement. A list of names that had already said yes.

Two months of Russian strikes destroyed about 13 million books in Ukraine — a third of a year's output. 1.2 million were school textbooks. For some subjects, the entire print run for the new school year is gone. Armies bomb factories. Barbarians bomb the books children were about to open.

The woman who worked on Amazon's early business plans just published her new novel where Amazon can't sell it: free on Substack, chapter by chapter. A publisher hands you a supply chain and keeps the reader list. Substack hands you the list. At $40bn that's the one thing you still can't buy.

The Odyssey is roughly 3,000 years old and its UK print sales just jumped 1,400% in four weeks. Up 76% in the US. Screen adaptations don't replace books. They send people back to them.

404 Media hid an AirTag in a shipment of rare books. It ended up at Amazon's LAS8 warehouse in Las Vegas, where a unit cuts the bindings off, scans the pages and destroys the paper. The scans train Amazon's Nova models. Amazon won't say why the books have to die.

A Galway bookshop got an order for 5,000 nonfiction titles: thirty-year-old driving test manuals, a guide to a savings scheme that no longer exists. Booksellers think the books are bound for AI training data. (RTÉ) Nobody bids like that for the reading.

Five Pulitzer winners disclosed using AI this year, a record. The rules were explicit: fine for digging through data, not for writing or editing the story. That same question lands on the book entry forms next year. Novelists are about to have the argument journalists just finished.

Publishers worry that AI will write the books. The nearer risk is that it replaces everything they do after the book is written.

AI scandals like Jerry Faladay’s will soon be history. Two trends matter: AI companies are rolling out official markers that can show which model generated a text. And readers will soon stop caring whether AI helped write a book—they’ll buy it even if the cover says: “Written with AI.”

I spent thirty years in media before I started writing about it. Spy thrillers, sold direct in Ukraine — no bookstores, no Amazon. Liquid Cube: a programme that doesn't recruit agents but manufactures them. 352 pages, three formats.