Counting Down

We’re shining a spotlight on Ballast Book Company and sales rep Keith Arsenault as the week-long countdown to the Friday reveal of PW’s Bookstore and Sales Rep of the Year begins. The clock is also ticking on a class action copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Meta and the AAP lends its support in a friend-of-the court brief. Agent Richard Curtis pays tribute to mass market paperbacks as the format steadily fades away, and the New York Times catalogs the books now banned from the Naval Academy’s library. For the Seattle Times, Tom Fay considers how the dismantlement of the IMLS is threatening the future of libraries not just in Seattle, but across the country. There’s similar turmoil across the pond, where requests to remove books from libraries are coinciding with the growing influence of U.S. pressure groups throughout the U.K. The Verge documents the popularity of book-themed fantasy balls, inspired by blockbusters like Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing and Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses. And Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist, has died at 89.