Boston bookstore Porter Square Books launched a publication earlier this month, The Porter Square Review of Books, which will publish “weekly(ish)” book reviews of new releases across all genres for all ages. Nieman Lab reports that reviews will be written by booksellers and writers-in-residence, and be rounded up in a monthly newsletter. The team writes in an announcement, “The decline of books coverage in the media, including a dramatic decline in regular old book reviews, has been well documented. Even before the Washington Post shuttered their entire books section, readers had relatively few newspapers, journals, or media outlets to turn to […]
Bookstores
Bookselling: A New Powerhouse Books Location, And More
On May 22, Powerhouse Books opened a new bookstore in the former Amazon books space in the Shops at Columbus Circle. Amazon occupied the space starting in 2017, and vacated it in 2022 when Amazon announced it would close all brick-and-mortar stores. Powerhouse has three other locations in Brooklyn. Elsewhere, Harvard Book Store is opening a new location at 33 Union Street in Boston, near Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. The store will be 3,500 square feet with a 1,500 square foot cafe operated by Lakon Paris Patisserie. Harvard Book Store general manager Lisa Jayne said in a release, “We […]
ABA Added Over 500 New Members In 2025
ABA CEO Allison Hill wrote in her annual letter to members that membership grew by 19% in 2025, with the addition of 605 brick-and-mortar, pop-up, and mobile stores. The AP breaks it down further as 3,417 members (up 554 members from a year ago), operating at 3,783 locations. The organization has grown 151% over the last six years. Hill writes, “the majority of stores also reported year-over-year increases in sales for 2025 over 2024.” She continues: “2025 was also the most challenging year for indies on record as our members faced rising costs, tariffs, the impact of ICE and the […]
Zoom Books Responds To Accusations of Selling Books For AI Scraping
Canadian company Zoom Books has responded to accusations that they are purchasing out of print books in bulk from bookstores to sell to AI companies for LLM training. They write in a statement to PL that the claims made in Demócrata that books purchased by Zoom Books from Spanish booksellers are being scraped for AI are “categorically false.” “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose,” writes the company. “Any claim or implication to the contrary is inaccurate.” They continue: “Our business […]
Canadian Company Zoom Books Is Buying Out Of Print Books For AI Scraping
Canadian company Zoom Books is buying out of print books in bulk from used bookstores all over the world to scrape them for LLM training. Multiple bookstores in Spain recently flagged unusual orders, writes Demócrata. One store, Fènix in Badalona, noted that orders focused on “Catalan non-fiction titles that had been stored for years and had practically no commercial outlet.” Demócrata notes that “stores in Germany, the USA, New Zealand, and Australia have received similar orders, some of more than a thousand books, many out of print.” Zoom Books writes on its website that it buys used books and accepts […]
B&N CEO Responds to Criticism About Selling AI-Generated Books
Responding to online criticism, Barnes & Noble ceo James Daunt tempered remarks he made earlier this week in a Today Show interview, in which he said that the chain would stock AI-created books as long as they were clearly labeled. “I have actually no problem selling any book, as long as it doesn’t masquerade or pretend to be something that it isn’t, and that it has an essential quality to it, and that the customer, the reader, wants it,” Daunt told book club host and imprint publisher Jenna Bush Hager. “So as long as an AI-written book says it’s an […]