Friday Link-O-Thon

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

Note: A writer error earlier today meant the wrong post was sent to the books as of today. Sorry about that. This is today’s day in the books.

Cool news the day before the holiday weekend, so it’s a good time to square up my bookmarked Link accounts.

• Print sales declined by 3.1% in the first quarter of 2026 [Publishers Weekly]
• The Very Hungry Caterpillar video game comes to Apple Arcade [Apple]
• Viggo Mortensen’s Aragorn will be recast in ‘Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum’ [Variety]
• Why are Swedish schools bringing back books? [Undark]
• Tennessee librarian fired after refusing to move more than 100 books from children’s to adult section [Associated Press]
• Is it wrong to write a book with AI? [The New York Times]
• 23 Books in 23 Days: Jeremy O. What Harris read while imprisoned in Japan [Vanity Fair]
• 16 Strangers, a 304-page novel and a weekend of reading aloud [The New York Times]
• What is the daily routine of so-called super-readers? [Lit Hub]
• What bookstores want from traditional publishers—and how the bookstore market has changed [Jane Friedman]
• 5 Years of Lessons from Running Your Own Bookstore [Ryan Holiday]
• ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ TV Series From Seth MacFarlane’s Fuzzy Door, Chris Yost Arrives at Peacock [Variety]
• First-of-its-kind publisher emerges from Minnesota prison writing workshop [MPR News]
• Penguin to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT version of German children’s book [The Guardian]