In a panel discussion at Winter Institute 2026 Monday afternoon, American Booksellers Association CEO Allison Hill identified two "shifts in the tide" that could drastically change the industry in the coming years: the decline in reading and the proliferation of artificial intelligence. 

On hand to talk about the decline in reading were Nic Bottomley, co-owner of Mr. B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England, and Brien Lopez, manager of Children's Book World in Los Angeles, Calif. Then Lopez, Bookshop.org CEO Andy Hunter, and ABA director of IndieCommerce Phil Davies discussed AI.

Bottomley described the National Year of Reading, a literacy initiative designed to combat what in the U.K. is called the reading crisis. The initiative has government support and is designed to get everyone reading, though Bottomley noted there are three particularly crucial segments: getting parents reading to children between the ages of 1 and 5; getting teenage boys reading; and getting books into low-income households.

From left: Allison Hill, Phil Davies, Andy Hunter, and Brien Lopez

One early lesson from the campaign is the value of rebranding and reframing--instead of talking about a reading crisis, the U.K. is now celebrating a national year of reading. The campaign has also served as a reminder of the critical work that bookshops and libraries already do and has helped remind the entire ecosystem "how vital they are."

Lopez said the core of the bookselling business is "sharing the joy of reading," and while booksellers are doing "so many things right," there are areas for improvement. He encouraged booksellers to think about how they curate children's titles: Are they organized to make it easier for staff members to shelve, or for children to find what excites them? Kids, he pointed out, "are not going to look by an author's last name."

More broadly, adults create plenty of "roadblocks" that are "not conducive to a child loving reading." Books get labeled as "good books" or "bad books," with graphic novels often included in the latter category, and Lopez said he's seen so many parents try to steer their children away from graphic novels. He has advised parents "over and over again" to let their children read what they like and start their reading lives in a "joyful place." A child who loves graphic novels could easily start reading chapter books, but a child discouraged from reading graphic novels probably won't suddenly start reading chapter books of their own volition.

Bottomley agreed, saying he'd "rather see bookshops come from a place of welcome and warmth" than dictate what customers should or should not read. He said he thinks of the shop as a "playground for books" and believes the right book "is the one the customer is in the mood for." He was skeptical of bookshops that have things like no-cellphones rules, and encouraged booksellers to think hard about "how to make our shops the most welcoming spaces they can be." The best way for booksellers to achieve their missions, he said, "is to still be in business."

'Forced into the Future'
After Hunter and Davies took the stage to join the conversation about AI, Hunter described a chaotic, unclear situation, with the tech industry and the current administration rushing to build AI infrastructure as fast as they can, burning through huge amounts of both money and fossil fuels. In the book industry, it's already taking work from translators and illustrators, and the market is being flooded with low-quality titles. Society is being "forced into the future" at an incredibly rapid speed, and the people driving it all "don't even know what's going to happen."

Though the AI situation is altogether "not looking great," Hunter continued, there are still reasons to be engaged. If AI is the battlefield of the future, he said, it would be a mistake to disengage entirely and "cede it to people who don't share our values." He suggested the industry look into ways that AI can help business, mentioning that AI tools might help Bookshop's small engineering team develop new features in less time.

The ongoing deluge of AI slop also affords the industry the opportunity to "turn it around" by emphasizing the value and importance of human work. There are some nascent initiatives in the works to create "certified human" badges and labels, and in general, as "everything gets sh*ttier," people will look to sources of integrity and quality. Booksellers can be those sources, Hunter said.

Davies agreed that booksellers shouldn't discard AI entirely. The technology "won't go away," and booksellers could have the chance to help "remake" AI in the "image you want." He said IndieCommerce is looking at "minimalist" ways to utilize AI, with one example being using AI tools to help stop AI titles from flooding IndieCommerce feeds. 

Lopez urged publishers who are acquiring books from self-published authors to do their "due diligence" and make sure the books were not made with AI. Sometimes it seems that publishers are "not even looking at the flash drives" before publishing, and booksellers are seeing the results in-store. At the same time, he's finding more and more children's books without an author or illustrator name on them; looking inside those titles, it's clear what's going on. "It's already here," he said. --Alex Mutter

Late yesterday, Winter Institute 2026 ended with a closing keynote featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil in conversation with Isaac Fitzgerald. Afterward, ABA CEO Allison Hill announced that the next Winter Institute will be held February 10-14, 2027, in Minneapolis, Minn. Our reporting on Winter Institute 2026, including a wrapup on Monday, continues next week.

Booksellers streamed into the Galley Room following its opening on Tuesday morning.

The panel at the Learning from Alternative & Adaptive Models educational session at the Independent Publishers Caucus's Indie Press Summit: (from l.) moderator Andrea Fleck Nisbet, Independent Book Publishers Association; Madeleine McIntosh, Authors Equity; Angela Engel, the Collective Book Studio; and Chris Gruener, Stable Book Co.

At the Vendor Showcase, HarperCollins staff celebrated their American Classics series, launching in May.

The keynote conversation on the state of the industry at the Independent Publishers Caucus's Indie Press Summit featured (from l.) CJ Alberts of Bindery Books and Sunny's bookstore, Yuma, Ariz.; Christie Henry of Princeton University Press; Doug Seibold of Agate Publishing; moderator Patrick Hughes of Pluto Press; Peggy Burns, Drawn & Quarterly; and Andy Hunter of Bookshop.org.

David Goldberg of Pushkin/Steerforth had the most cheerful table in the Meet the Presses section, which included note cards of booksellers' favorite titles.

A bird's-eye view of the Wednesday evening Author Reception.

Karen Tei Yamashita, author of Questions 27 & 28 (Graywolf Press, April 28), with (standing, from l.) Yuka Igarashi of Graywolf; James Crossley, Leviathan Bookstore, St. Louis, Mo.; and Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books, Seattle, Wash. 

Julián Delgado Lopera, author of Pretend You're Dead and I Carry You (coming from Liveright on May 26), with Patrick Flaherty, Community Bookstore & Terrace Books, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Back Again Book Shop, a new and used bookstore in Myrtle Beach, S.C., officially opened its second store with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on February 12, at 700 Highway 17 Business South in Surfside Beach, S.C. The store posted on social media: "Thank you to everyone who came out to support our new location in Surfside Beach this morning. We are grateful, happy, blessed, and excited for everything!"

Owners Kelsey and Aaron Simons told WPDE that when they first moved to the area from Washington State, "they realized the north end of Myrtle Beach was a 'book desert,' so they opened a book shop to fill that void. They recently opened a second location on the south end of the Grand Strand." The stores are about 14 miles apart.

"We just love being able to be booksellers, " said Kelsey Simons. "We love books and we love the book community. And we're so grateful that we have our store in the North End, but to be able to spread it out and make sure that everybody is within a easy distance of being able to have a book of their own and being able to purchase books."

Edelweiss is launching a new product tier called Discovery Access, designed to expand visibility for qualifying independent and emerging publishers. Discovery Access will enable participating publishers to make their titles searchable within Edelweiss, visible in saved filter results, and eligible for inclusion in bookseller-, librarian-, and media-curated Collections. 

This product focuses on discoverability and metadata presence, the company said. The full Edelweiss Catalog Services will continue to provide enhanced catalog and merchandising tools, including digital review copies, publisher-controlled catalog markup, analytics, and advanced marketing features. 

"This approach offers publishers of different sizes and needs flexible levels of engagement within the broader industry workflow," Edelweiss noted. "It preserves the robust tools and functionality our full-service publisher partners rely on, while expanding publisher participation in the discovery process."

"A key part of Edelweiss's mission and value proposition is to make broad discovery accessible," said John Rubin, founder and CEO of Edelweiss. "This new offering is designed to provide a clear, affordable option for title visibility."

Eligibility requirements and rollout details will be shared in the coming months, with implementation expected later this year. 

Tell Me a Story: Fantastic Children's Books from the Library of Congress, which "reimagines the canon of American children's literature while tracing the evolution of literary, artistic, and publishing trends," has been published by the LOC and is distributed by the University of North Carolina Press. Tell Me a Story is available in paperback in the Library of Congress Store and via booksellers. 

This new book is the fourth installment in the Library's Collection Close-Up series, "which celebrates the variety, breadth and depth of Library of Congress collections. These compact and accessible books bring Library collections to life through historical anecdotes, colorful images, and descriptive captions and sidebars," the LOC noted.

In his foreword to Tell me a Story, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Mac Barnett writes that children's literature is a "huge and varied realm," including books written for kids, at kids, and even "books written for adults that children discover and wind up loving most." 

Edward Hoagland, "whose shimmering essays explored the wonders of the natural world, the sights of faraway places, and his own journeys into blindness," died February 17, the New York Times reported. He was 93. John Updike called him "the best essayist of my generation," and Philip Roth praised him as "America's most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist." 

His essay collections, including Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), The Courage of Turtles (1970), Red Wolves and Black Bears (1976), and The Tugman's Passage (1982), gathered works first published in the Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. Other books include Balancing Acts (1992); The Final Fate of the Alligators (1992); African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (1979); Seven Rivers West (1986), Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse (2013), and In the Country of the Blind (2016).

Hoagland divided his time for many years between New York City and Vermont, writing about both city and rural life. In his essay "In the Country of the Blind," which was included in Compass Points (2001), he wrote: "I loved the city like the country--the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook--and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good."

From childhood, the Times wrote, Hoagland had a severe stutter, and found comfort in books as well as solitary walks in the Connecticut countryside. He determined early on to be a writer, a life that would afford him a fluent means of communication, but the career plan did not sit well with his parents. 

"I tended to downplay my various excitements in the house lest they be restricted or used against me," he wrote in "Small Silences," included in Sex and the River Styx (2011). "It was not a silly instinct because my parents did soon tell me I was reading too much, and by prep school were telling my favorite teachers that I was too intrigued by nature and writing; that these were dodges due to my handicap and might derail a more respectable career in law or medicine."

At Harvard, he studied writing with poet Archibald MacLeish, who became his mentor. While still an undergraduate, Hoagland won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, which included publication of Cat Man (1956), his first novel, followed by The Circle Home (1960) and The Peacock's Tail (1965).

His first nonfiction book was Notes from the Century Before (1969). "A single long narrative of a trek through British Columbia, with its people and places indelibly portrayed, it drew rapturous critical praise," the Times noted.

In his 50s, Hoagland began to lose his eyesight and for three years was legally blind before an innovative operation restored his sight, though not permanently. The books he wrote in the 1990s were considered some of his finest, among them Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life (1999) and Compass Points (2002). 

In a 1994 Times essay, Hoagland wrote of family and friends who had died: "I don't expect to rejoin or 'miss' these people in the hereafter, yet, having spent a great deal of my personal and professional life riding a surf of wind-song, wolf howls, elephants snuffling, trees soughing, grasshoppers buzzing, frogs croaking, I do think I'll mix in somehow with all of the above, the wine of human nature blending with the milk of outdoor nature in a mulligatawny soup of soil, rainwater and pondy chemicals, with infinite possibilities once again."

As part of its Lunch & Learn series, the Book Industry Study Group is hosting a webinar this coming Tuesday, March 3, noon-1 p.m. Eastern, on how booksellers view the supply chain. Speakers are Roxanne J. Coady, founder and owner of RJ Julia Booksellers, Madison, Conn., and Alan Dubose, senior v-p of planning & data analytics at Books-A-Million. Topics will include what booksellers wish publishers understood better and did differently; challenges and opportunities facing booksellers; trends in inventory decisions, assortment, and store performance; and more. Cost is free for BISG members; $25 nonmembers. For more information, click here.

Protagonist Books & Coffee, Dryden, N.Y., shared a photo of the shop's new storefront window art on Instagram, noting: "We are at the bookstore, so we've said so long to our friendly window snowman and switched it up for some flowers. Maybe if we wish it hard enough, we will get an early spring."

Left Bank Books, St. Louis, Mo., posted on Instagram: "Hope y'all don't mind a little Orleans appreciation post, what can we say we love the lil' guy almost as much as he loves a good mail tote."

Posted on Instagram by Fitz Books & Waffles, Buffalo, N.Y.: "The sun will come out! It's been a brutal month, what with the arctic blast, the fascist assault (hear, hear to the people of Minneapolis for beating it back!) and other events. But we can feel the tide turning. FITZ is open noon to 6 in our light-filled home."

Filming begins next month on an untitled, "darkly comic drama based on Nathaniel Rich's 2019 book Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change, a true story "set at a beachside resort in Florida in 1980, when 20 experts gather for a weekend conference on a global issue that is starting to gain traction: the effects of Co2 emissions on the climate," Deadline reported. 

Directed by Tom McCarthy (Spotlight) from a script he co-wrote with Thomas Bidegan and Noé Debré, the project stars Paul Rudd, Evan Peters, Amy Ryan, Paul Giamatti, John Turturro, Tatiana Maslany, and Jason Clarke.

A longlist has been released for the €100,000 (about $104,415) Dublin Literary Award, which is sponsored by Dublin City Council to honor a single work of fiction published in English. Nominations are submitted by librarians and readers from a network of libraries around the world. If the winning book has been translated, the author receives €75,000 (about $88,600) and the translator €25,000 (about $29,535).

The shortlist will be unveiled April 7 and the winner named May 21, as part of International Literature Festival Dublin. Check out the complete International Dublin Literary Award longlist here.

photo: Marlayna Demond

New York Times, Sunday Times, and USA Today bestselling author B.K. Borison is the author of cozy, contemporary romances featuring emotionally vulnerable characters and swoon-worthy settings. The latest in her Heartstrings series is And Now, Back to You (Berkley Books, February 24, 2026), a When Harry Met Sally-inspired, opposites-attract romance about two meteorologists.

Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:

Two competing meteorologists get trapped in the mountains during a historic snowstorm. There is only one bed.

On your nightstand now:

We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian. Cat has such a tender, effortless way of writing that is deeply romantic. I particularly love how she slowly stitches connection between her characters through the smallest of details. Her voice feels like a cold drink of water. Whenever I feel uninspired or small, I pick up one of her books. They itch my brain in exactly the right way.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien was my first full obsession as a kid. I think at one point I even tried to learn elvish. The world is so rich and immersive, it pulled me right in. In my heart, I am always somewhere in the Shire.

Your top five authors:

Nora Ephron, Cat Sebastian, Joss Richard, Ellen O'Clover, and Anita Kelly. I will literally drop anything I'm doing to read something they've put together, including their grocery lists.

Book you've faked reading:

I had a college professor I didn't like who assigned his own book as part of the class curriculum. I couldn't even find summary notes for it online, so I really flew by the seat of my pants in that class. Typically, I think every book has something in it to be learned from, but I really didn't think that man had anything valuable to say.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Literally everyone in my life is tired of hearing me yap about Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian, but it is truly one of the most tender, affirming books I have ever read and I genuinely don't know how she's capable of writing such powerful love stories over and over again.

Book you've bought for the cover:

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. The colors are so striking. It reminds me of those old sci-fi broadcast features from when I was a kid. I'm also such a sucker for the original Penguin classic covers. When I was growing up, they had an entire display at Barnes & Noble of those covers specifically, and I remember slowly working my way through that display with my babysitting cash. I still have those editions of Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, dog-eared with notes in the margin.

Book you hid from your parents:

My parents told me I wasn't allowed to read at the dinner table, and I didn't listen, so I usually was hiding a book on my lap. I explicitly remember hiding a copy of a The Baby-Sitters Club book while I was supposed to be eating pot roast. I also used to bring a banged-up copy of a Tolkien book with me to church class. It was confiscated, but luckily I had like 17 copies of that book.

Book that changed your life:

Not a book, but reading the screenplay for Sleepless in Seattle was the first time I was consumed with the writing of something. I had always loved books, but Tom Hanks has a monologue where he's talking about magic and I remember sitting on my bed and thinking, "I want to do that." Nora Ephron has such a lovely, magical, whimsical approach to love stories that has deeply inspired by own story telling.

Favorite line from a book:

I can't believe I'm actually going to quote Shakespeare, but there's a line in "Venus and Adonis" that I've always loved where he says, "For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again."

I've always found that to be terribly dramatic and wonderfully romantic.   

There's also a line in Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These where the character reflects and says: "As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another?"

I think about that moment a lot--what it means to be a person that exists as a part of a community. And how we can better shape ourselves to be part of a we versus a me.

Five books you'll never part with:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, Atonement by Ian McEwan.

Look at that spectrum! I like thinking of books as little bookmarks on the chapter of life I read them in. Sometimes when I open up one of these books, I remember exactly where I was the last time I read it and it's a wonderful feeling of... time travel, almost. I like comparing how I feel reading it now to how I felt when I was reading it before. It's like a window to a different time, except you're looking in your heart.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

Sometimes there's a magical moment when a book hits you at exactly the right time and is exactly what you need, and that book for me was The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. I felt so taken care of when I read that book for the first time. It made my belly swoop and my throat tighten in all the best ways.

Congratulations to art lovers who have never had someone say to them, "What purpose does art serve?" For aesthetes, the answer is obvious. At its most profound, art provides new perspectives, confronts injustice, assures those who feel like perpetual outsiders that they're not alone. Critic Megan O'Grady has always embraced conceptual artist Barbara Kruger's observation that art teaches a person, "through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Knowing a good title when she hears one, O'Grady borrows those words for How It Feels to Be Alive, a collection of five essays in which she investigates the way art "provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society." She has chosen works that raised "questions that still feel urgent to me" and "offered me an eloquent shorthand in an often-incoherent world."

These marvelous pieces follow a similar structure. Each begins by focusing on one artist and then expands into a larger discourse on pressing themes. Her essay on Kruger starts with Kruger's most famous image, Untitled (Your Body Is a Battleground), "depicting a woman's face, bisected into positive and negative exposures." The mother of a young daughter, O'Grady describes how works like Untitled taught her that her body was politicized in ways men's bodies aren't and wonders "how art could meaningfully respond." This leads to a more expansive essay on women being reduced to nothing but a body.

The other essays are equally provocative. Her piece on Agnes Martin's painting Friendship, a "gridded field of gold," and Martin's life off-grid--she left New York for a New Mexico mesa--elaborates on the role of grids, from Zoom boxes to strictures in one's life, that harmonize as much as constrict. Her essay on a photo from Carrie Mae Weems's Kitchen Table Series, in which a Black mother and daughter apply lipstick while peering into vanity mirrors, addresses the desire of underrepresented audiences to see themselves in art. The water bottle decorated with "a sinister image of Flint, Michigan's water plant" by Pope.L calls attention to "the racism at play in the systematic undermining of the once-thriving town." And environmental artist Beverly Pepper's massive outdoor sculptures lead O'Grady to muse upon the land art movement from the 1960s and '70s, and many Americans' indifference to environmental disaster, as when she notes that the warnings represented by wildfires in Colorado, her home at the time of writing, inexplicably fail to elicit more than mild concern. How It Feels to Be Alive is a memorable and viscerally elegant treatment of these critical themes. Know anyone who questions the value of art? Hand them a copy of this book. -- Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer

Shelf Talker: How It Feels to Be Alive by critic Megan O'Grady collects five essays about artists whose provocative works address pressing questions of sexism, racism, environmental degradation, and more.