In the run-up to Banned Books Week (October 5-11), PEN America has released its annual report about book bans in schools. The numbers back up the pull-no-punches title: "The Normalization of Book Banning."

Among the notable findings:

🚫 22,810 books have been banned in public schools since 2021.

🚫 The bans are reported in 45 states and 451 school districts.

🚫 Connecticut, Delaware, Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii have not recorded book bans in the last five years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t happening.

🚫 The real numbers are likely higher, since PEN’s numbers come from book bans reported directly to them and in the media.

🚫 The most frequently banned title last year was A Clockwork Orange, removed in 23 school districts.

The good news: communities are pushing back. Of the 87 districts that removed books last school year, 70 had evidence of a response from individuals or organized groups.

Sign up for our Literary Activism newsletter to stay informed about book banning, censorship, and how you can stand up for freedom of speech.

There are tons of new books vying for your attention every month, so we’ve developed a highly scientific vibes-based assessment. The ideal It Book rings four bells:

🔔 Art – Is it good?

🔔 Acclaim – Will it contend for awards and best-of lists?

🔔 Sales – Where’s the money?

🔔 Zeitgeist – What’s the buzz?

October has big names, awards contenders, and a bonus helping of horror.

🎧 Listen as we play a knockout round with 11 of the buzziest books of the month.

The internet never forgets. DeleteMe makes sure it can’t keep everything. Use DeleteMe to protect your privacy and stay in control of your digital life. By removing your personal information from data brokers, DeleteMe helps block the telemarketers, spammers, and scammers who thrive on it. Trusted since 2011, it’s the leading service for taking your information back.

Book Riot launched on October 3, 2011. It was the year Siri came to iPhones, the Timeline feature came to Facebook, and Snapchat made its debut.

It’s been a wild ride since the days of our original graffiti-inspired logo, and we couldn’t be more grateful to get to continue doing this work with smart, creative people who care about the power of books and reading.

Here are some of the enduring lessons from the last 14 years:

→ Content is hard. It’s easy to forget as you scroll through endless content that all of it was created by a person who sat down and had to decide what to make. Every post, newsletter, and podcast episode is the product of countless small decisions.

→ No one knows what The Next Big Thing will be. The zeitgeist is unpredictable, and publishing is a casino. Folks do their best to make bets on titles they think they can turn into successes, but they’re at a perpetual disadvantage trying to guess what readers will want to buy in 2-4 years based on data about what they have already bought. Literary lightning rarely strikes twice. 

→ Building your professional life around your hobby will change your relationship to it. I still spend a great deal of my free time reading, but I am much less interested in The Book as Object and much less attached to books as signifiers of my identity than I was 14 years ago. This isn’t how it shakes out for everyone, but it’s worth saying that if you love books and think you might want a career in publishing, you should be ready for the sparkle to fade or shift. – RS

A lot of people are on our bitin’ list , but Tyler Childers isn’t one of them. The award-winning country singer, also an avid reader, has partnered with Libby to launch the Hickman Holler Reading Club, which will feature a curated selection of his personal favorites.

Fans who attend Childers’s 2025 tour will find pop-up libraries hosted by the Hickman Holler Reading Club and Libby in partnership with local libraries, where they’ll be able to sign up for a library card, learn about library resources, and enter giveaways.

The first selection, which inspired the title of Childers’ 2025 tour, is On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

p.s. Libby has also launched a hub for Read With Jenna picks.

Some bars have stories. This one has legends. In Eerie Basin by Ivy Pochoda, a gritty neighborhood hangout in a changing city becomes the stage where myth and memory collide.

Old-timers whisper tales, her boss swears by a strange encounter, and the main character’s skepticism is tested as unexplainable things begin to unfold.

Now that we have turned the page to fall, we can look back at what summer book sales were doing. Here’s what Brenna Connor, Book Industry Analyst at Circana, says were the biggest trends last season:

🚀 Science Fiction leads the market with the fastest sales increases versus prior year. Growth accelerated in early July, coinciding with the Project Hail Mary movie trailer release starring Ryan Gosling.

📚 Classics and Literary Fiction maintain steady strength, driven largely by increased interest in dystopian works from Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell.

🔪 Thrillers and fantasy show notable decline, consistently under-performing year-over-year benchmarks. Freida McFadden and Sarah J. Mass are showing the steepest sales declines in these segments, comping against last summer’s success.

💖 Romance sales have exhibited a turbulent pattern, with weekly fluctuations that show an erratic buying cycle. Despite this overall volatility, the dark romance subgenre has shown strength, with authors Navessa Allen, H.D. Carlton, and Rina Kent ranking among the summer’s highest growth performers.

For a while , ebook readers were a fairly boring product category. Not in a bad way, really: e-ink devices across platforms were all pretty great, with crisp displays, long battery life, and wide connectivity choices.

Two broad innovation categories over the last several years have made things quite a bit more interesting: color and input. The latest generation of devices has color screens and pens, bringing the category closer to tablet computing in terms of capability, while still retaining the size and battery advantages of e-ink.

This week, Amazon launched its new top-of-the-line device, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft (along with upgrades to the regular Scribes as well). It’s a pretty impressive product, with a price (starting at $629.99) to match.

Here are the key features:

🌈 Color display: The Scribe is not the first Kindle device with a color screen, but it’s the first time it has been available at this size. The color displays in Kindles have been well-regarded, so this is likely a solid all-around color experience.

➕ A bigger display : Jumping from 10.2 to 11 inches brings the Kindle Scribe right in line with the middle size of the iPad line-up.

↴ Thinner and lighter: The 2025 Kindle Scribe models weigh 400 grams and measure 5.4 mm thick, down from 433 grams and 5.7 mm in the 2024 models.

🤖 AI features: Two notable AI integrations specifically for book readers: Story So Far and Ask This Book.

• Story So Far will give you a quick summary of what you’ve read recently to remind you of what’s going on in your current read, which might be especially helpful if you go a few days between reading sessions.
• Ask This Book lets you highlight a passage and then ask questions about characters and the meaning of a scene (all spoiler-free, notably). These features will launch with the new Kindle Scribes and then roll out to some older devices and Kindle Apps sometime in 2026.

The new Kindle Scribes will be available in the U.S. later this year, presumably in time for holiday gift season.

The Deluxe Edition of Red Rising is a stunning collector’s volume with premium design, exclusive details, and a presentation worthy of Darrow’s legendary story. Perfect for devoted Howlers or new readers, it’s the ultimate way to experience Pierce Brown’s modern sci-fi classic and a gift any fan will treasure.

🧳 Visit the oldest library in the world on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Morocco.**

🍿 Watch the teaser trailer for Netflix’s adaptation of People We Meet on Vacation.

🧛‍♀️ Sink your teeth into books that blend romance, fantasy, and horror.

🏆 Check out the finalists for the Center for Fiction’s 2025 First Novel Prize

🎧 Listen to the best audiobooks by Latine authors.

_{**This is a product recommendation from the Book Riot team. When you buy through these links, we may earn a commission.}

Written by Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal. Thanks to Vanessa Diaz for copy editing.

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