After four straight weeks of declining year-over-year book sales, the final full holiday week of sales, for the week ending December 21, was very strong, according to Circana Bookscan. Sales of 33.34 million units were up 4.6 percent over the comparable week from 2023, when consumers bought 31.88 million units — making it the best holiday week of print sales recorded by Bookscan over the past five years. That late surge in book sales also suggests that the final sales week of the year, which will include two more days of holiday sales, could be strong on a comparison basis […]
Archives for December 2024
DOE Allows Digital Textbook “Inclusive Access” Programs to Remain Opt-Out
The US Department of Education has terminated a rulemaking process that would have converted “inclusive access” programs, in which colleges charge students for digital course materials at the beginning of the semester as part of their tuition and other fees, from opt-out to opt-in. That change, if executed, would have significantly reduced participation, and therefore sales. Inclusive access purports to give students the best price for the bundled courseware, along with some kind of ability to opt out of the package. In a report published December 26, the DOE wrote, “We are persuaded by concerns raised…about the need to gather […]
Publishers Will Print Still More Deluxe Editions in 2025
Publishers will keep producing more deluxe hardcover editions in 2025 with patterned edges, fancy covers, special endpapers and more. For Rebecca Yarros’s ONYX STORM, publishing January 21, Entangled is producing 2 million copies of the deluxe edition and 500,000 copies of the regular version. The publisher tells the NYT they have over one million pre-orders already. Penguin Random House says it plans at least 50 books with decorated edges in 2025, twice as many as they produced in 2024. William Morrow expects to print over 35 deluxe editions, up from 13; and Tor plans at least 45 special productions, up […]
News Updates: Kiran Desai’s Novel, Obama’s Reading, Mel Robbins’ Latest, and A BN Picket
Kiran Desai‘s long-awaited novel THE LONELINESS OF SONIA AND SUNNY will be published on September 23, 2025 by PRH’s Hogarth imprint. The deal for the book was first announced in fall 2010, a year after Desai won the Booker Prize for THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS. At the time, the book was expected for publication in 2013. It was acquired for Knopf, by the late Sonny Mehta and former editorial director Robin Desser. David Ebershoff edited for Hogarth, and the novel weighs in at 656 pages. Separately, former president Barack Obama announced his 10 favorite books of 2024. On Tuesday, December […]
Arkansas’s Onerous Book Banning Law Declared Unconstitutional
Federal courts continue to push back on overzealous state book banning laws. Following a preliminary injunction 17 months ago stalling Arkansas’s book banning law, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks found that two sections of the law are unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment, and issued a permanent injunction blocking those portions on Monday. He wrote: “If the General Assembly’s purpose in passing Section 1 was to protect younger minors from accessing inappropriate sexual content in libraries and bookstores, the law will only achieve that end at the expense of everyone else’s First Amendment rights. The law deputizes librarians […]