Final Chapter

After more than a year of legal proceedings, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín has officially approved the historic $1.5 billion settlement in authors and publishers’ class action copyright lawsuit against AI giant Anthropic. A spate of popular children’s and YA titles helped give May publishing sales a 7% boost, compared to the same period last year. A son of former Scholastic chairman and CEO Dick Robinson has filed a lawsuit challenging the validity of his late father’s will, which gave control of the publisher to Iole Lucchese. In other news, EveryLibrary raises the alarm about the Senate’s recently proposed national book ban bill, writing that it could “chill access to books and encourage censorship” in public schools across the country. 404 Media investigates ISBNdb, a company wholesaling old print books to AI companies, which are increasingly struggling to find data sources free of “contamination” from AI-generated text. The miniseries adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady for PBS and BBC has assembled a star-studded cast, per the Hollywood Reporter. For the Atlantic, Sophia Nguyen considers the effectiveness of Dua Lipa’s efforts to promote the freedom to read, including her new banned-book library in Portugal. Duke University English professor Aarthi Vadde discusses her new book, which examines how digital platforms reshaped publishing. And for the New York Post, Shivani Vora reports on the backlist how-to guides going surprisingly viral on BookTok.