TG Jones, the UK bookstore chain that was known as WH Smith before it was acquired by Modella Capital last year, will go bankrupt almost immediately if their restructuring plan isn’t approved by a judge, the Bookseller reports. According to documents obtained by the Bookseller, the retailer will run out of funding “on or around the end of June 2026” and their court date will be on or about June 29. The company’s draconian restructuring plan includes staff layoffs and closing from 100 to 150 of the chain’s 480 locations, as well as “considerable investment in stores.” Eight stores are […]
Dylan Thomas Prize
Obituary: Judith Barnard
Judith Barnard, 94, died on May 6 of heart failure, the New York Times reports. Under the pseudonym Judith Michael, Barnard wrote 11 romantic thrillers with her husband Michael Fain, starting with the bestselling Deceptions in 1982. Barnard previously worked as a journalist and in 1967 published the novel The Past and Present of Solomon Sorge under her own name.
Correspondent, KPop Drive PRH in Q1
Bertelsmann shared a brief announcement on their financial results for the first quarter, noting that the company as a whole had €4.4 billion in sales, compared to €4.5 billion the previous year. Penguin Random House “delivered a strong business performance,” based on sales of Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent and Angela Song’s For the Fans! (KPop Demon Hunters), which sold 1.6 million copies in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Spain during the quarter, plus film-tie in editions of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
People 5/13
Retailers Lack Effective Tools to Combat AI Slop
A research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research confirms what consumers and publishers have long been aware of: There’s more AI slop for sale than ever. Based on an analysis of Amazon data—which, they say, dominates the global ebook market with more than two-thirds of the market share—the NBER notes that the number of new books available nearly tripled between 2022 and 2025, which coincides with the incidence of AI used in books. “Detected AI use is roughly zero through 2022, rises to 30 percent in 2023, to 45 percent in 2024, and surpasses 60 percent during 2025,” […]