bookward

'Moments of Grace': A Bookselling Parable Yesterday American Booksellers Association CEO Allison Hill welcomed attendees at the 21st Winter Institute with a story about the parallels

Allison Hill on the difficulty and triumph of being a bookseller now. Love books? Read this: www.shelf-awareness.com/theshelf/202...

Well that was a mildly scary, very delayed takeoff from DC in heavy snow.
17 hours of frustrating travel to end up in the same place I started.

I have spent literally the entire day at IAD after my connecting flight to Winter Institute was cancelled. Now watching the snow as I wait for a flight home that's overbooked and already late. Any bets on where I sleep tonight?

Amazon's tax bill plunges after GOP tax cuts The 87 percent drop is largely due to a more generous depreciation break in the 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act.'

Trump is giving tax cuts to Bezos but none to you.

Just a reminder as we look forward to this weekend...

We're going to win. There's a ton of hard work ahead of us & a lot more really bad days, but we've won before, with less resources & more capable foes. So we will win again.

Every reader of every age will have access to the books they need.

Wow.

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal Newly unsealed documents suggest that Anthropic was well aware that destroying books to train its AI would look bad.

Fuck these fucking thieves

Travel alert issued by civil rights groups for Florida tourists Groups like the ACLU warn Florida tourists their rights, liberty and physical security could be in danger.

Civil rights groups issue warning alert about #Florida dangers to would-be tourists. palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2...

between all the bookstores he put out of business and now the books section of the WaPo, you could make a case that Jeff Bezos is the greatest enemy of literacy there has ever been.

they both have female characters with long dark hair, I guess?

Netflix promo pic for a 2013 teen drama TV series called The Lying Game

Someone please splain Netflix algorithm to me. Because I watched THE WITCHER, I should like this?

I’ve Been Laid Off. I’m Not Done. After 20 years at The Washington Post, I’m suddenly on my own — and still writing about books.

For now, support now ex-editor Ron Charles! open.substack.com/pub/roncharl...

If I hadn't cancelled WaPo months ago, I sure would now. So sorry for all the excellent reporters and editors suffering Bezos's greed. #books

Michael Calderone & • 26m Executive editor Matt Murray just announced a "strategic reset" and cuts in meeting with Washington Post staff going on now Michael Calderone & • 20m The Post will be closing sports "in its current form" Michael Calderone • 17m The Post is shrinking international, restructuring metro Michael Calderone @ @mlcalderone X.com The Post is eliminating Books section 7:44 AM • 2/4/26 • 461 Views

WaPo also closing Books section and downsizing International and Metro sections

assholes.

FLHSMV Announces Driver License Exams to Be Administered in English Only

I swear the typos have gotten more aggressive lately.

The first thing that the little boy in Ezra Jack Keats’s children’s book “The Snowy Day” says is a simple statement of wonder: “It’s covered everything, as far as I can see!” The book has been checked out of the New York Public Library 485,000 times, making it the most popular thing they’ve got.

The first page of "The Snowy Day." It reads: One Winter morning Peter woke up and looks out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see."

It's hardly the most egregious failure of fact checking from the New York Times recently, but this outrageous assertion tells me that nobody who edited this story has actually read this book to a child. The entire book is narrated (beautifully) in the third person. 1/ www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/s...

"Anthropic initially considered buying books from libraries or used bookstores like New York City landmark the Strand... The store was “interested in providing used books,” according to a document... the book shop did not end up selling any books to Anthropic.

Inside one company’s secret plan to ‘destructively scan every book in the world’ Court filings reveal how AI companies raced to obtain more books to feed chatbots, including by buying, scanning and disposing of millions of titles.

Anthropic's plan to "destructively scan every book in the world"
[free WaPo link]

wapo.st/4rjXAMQ

Fun fact: Your local bookstore is doing more to protect you and your neighbors than Amazon is.

NEW: DHS appropriations bill funding ICE passes 220-207

7 Democrats voted YES on the bill:
- Jared Golden
- Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
- Henry Cuellar
- Tom Suozzi
- Laura Gillen
- Don Davis
- Vicente Gonzalez

One Republican voted NO: Thomas Massie

Breaking news: New baby alpaca born a few hours ago. So we moved the moms & young ones to another prairie so the big boys—male llamas and horses—don’t play too rough with the baby.

Please accept our timeline cleanse as you battle to preserve the 250-year old experiment of American Democracy.

A photo of Bob Weir walking thru the crowd heading to the stage at Boston's Fenway Park, June 2023.

Fenway, June 2023. RIP, Bobby.

Draft lotteries.

The woman killed by ICE today was a poet. She won the 2020 Academy of American Poets, University & College Poetry Prize at Old Dominion University.

(And this is Renee from confirmed socials- a photo of a different woman with red lipstick is going around, but that was a classmate.)
/

Happy New Year to you both, you look great!

Michael Sheen spent his own money to write off $1.3 million of neighbors’ debts | CNN Actor Michael Sheen has bought $1.3 million of his neighbors’ debts and written them off using $129,000 of his own money.

The actor Michael Sheen used all his money to start a fake debt collecting business, buy 900 people in Wales's debt, and excused it. If Musk bought ALL $194 billion in medical debt in the U.S. and excused it in the same way, he'd still be the world's riches man by hundreds of billions of dollars.

Title: The last-minute christmas rush at the bookshop. Image: diagram of a small bookshop packed with coloured dots representing people. The various colours represent the following groups: Contentedly browsing customer, Frazzled staff member, Can't find the book they want, Can't remember what they came for, Complete decision paralysis, In the queue to pay, Thinks they're in the queue but aren't, Dozed off in a comfy chair, Waiting to pounce on the comfy chair, Crying child, Crying adult, Vortex of discombobulated shoppers.

“The last-minute christmas rush at the bookshop.” - my latest cartoon for @theguardian.com books

Authors, remember that you CAN insist on human translation for your foreign-language editions and have it written into your contracts. You can no longer just assume you're going to get a human to work on the book whose every word you wrote with intent.