The Top Bookselling Stories of 2025

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The Top Bookselling Stories of 2025

Publishers Weekly ranked the 10 biggest stories from the world of bookselling in 2025. My big takeaway here is that…it was a pretty calm year for booksellers? The big publishing story of 2025 is clearly AI and the uses and abuses thereof, but compared to 5 or 10 years ago, the world of brick and mortar retail looks downright serene by comparison. Not that there weren’t stories and arguments and comings and goings, but it wasn’t a transformative year.

Barnes & Noble, Daunt Books Parent Company Rumored to Become a Publicly Traded Company

Big caveat to the above story: B&N/Daunt going public would be an enormous story. When Elliott Investment Management bought Barnes & Noble, there were two major questions: how would B&N fare and what was EIM’s long term goal? Private equity usually doesn’t buy and hold: they buy and then restructure and then sell. And usually the public market is the landing spot. My own sense is that Barnes & Noble is a stronger on-going concern now than it was before being acquired, though I know through B&N employees who write into Book Riot that it hasn’t been all sunshine and roses. I do believe that a strong and independent Barnes & Noble is good for American reading culture. So unless it can somehow buy itself from EIM and remain privately held, the only other way to independence is through an IPO. Deep breath.

I Took This One Personally

I have been wrestling with this bombshell article in The New Yorker about Oliver Sacks. He has been one of my favorite authors and a writer/thinker/person I have greatly admired. But as Rachel Aviv found in combing through his papers, especially his diaries, that many of his signal cases, around which he built his major books and his career, were just not true. Not in the way we expect from a scientific journalist. It is worth the long read, as painful as it is for Sacks fans. It is also a reminder: most nonfiction books are not fact-checked. But you know who is rigorously fact-checked? The New Yorker.