The Boox Palma 2 Pro is the Kindle killer
23 February 2026 (makeuseof.com)
It fits a full e-reader into a smartphone form that’s compact and fits into your pocket. The new model is only 175 grams, making it effortless to hold for long reading sessions or slip into a bag for reading on the go.
Ingram Launches New Digital Catalog, DRC, and Ordering Platform
23 February 2026 (Publishers Weekly)
The platform is intended as a cost-effective competitor to Above the Treeline’s Edelweiss and NetGalley.
If you own the Kindle ebook, you can get the Audible version at a discount
23 February 2026 (Gadget Guy)
“Immersion reading” is being added to the Audible app, joining the existing functionality on Kindle devices. Enabled via a ‘Read & Listen’ tab within the app, it highlights the text of an ebook while the audiobook plays.
Audible Now Lets You Read Along With Your Kindle Books
18 February 2026 (Publishers Weekly)
Audible has added its new Read & Listen feature, which allows users to to follow audiobook narration with synchronized, word-by-word highlighted text, provided they own the Kindle e-book.
Dutch streaming platform pays author only 8.5 cents per audiobook listen
18 February 2026 (NL Times)
For context, authors typically earn around 10 percent of the cover price for the first 4,000 copies of a physical book, equating to roughly 2 euros per book, while e-books often provide a 25 percent share of net proceeds.
Anna’s Archive rolls out the red carpet for robots – and asks them to “persuade” their humans to make donations
18 February 2026 (Complete Music Update)
Part of its unsettlingly chirpy pitch to the robots is a polite ask for any roving AI that comes across the page to consider the fact that it has “likely been trained in part on our data” and to make a donation. Or, if the robot in question is not equipped with the means to pay directly, to use their powers of “human persuasion” to talk an obliging meat puppet into doing it for them.
Growing signs of digital fatigue emerge from Digital Consumer Trends survey
17 February 2026 (Business Plus)
17% of respondents stopped reading e-books on digital devices in the past year.
ElevenLabs Summit: An Audiobook Company That Isn’t About Audiobooks
17 February 2026 (Publishing Perspectives)
Its recent London summit made clear that audiobooks are just one vertical among many for a company now valued at $11 billion. “The average UK resident spends 10 hours on hold each year.” That gap represents one of the largest immediate commercial opportunities in applied artificial intelligence.
Sweden: Spotify adds 1m homes to Swedish audiobook markets
17 February 2026 (Advanced Television)
In total, more than half of Swedish households now have access to audiobooks through a subscription reports Mediavision.
The Onyx Boox Note Air 5 C has perfected the recipe for the ideal E Ink tablet
16 February 2026 (MSN)
Onyx Boox tablets are what Amazon’s Kindle e-readers could only dream of being. Equipped with the Google Play Store, native OCR, stylus support, and a wide range of features found in full-fledged Android tablets, Boox’s E Ink devices are spectacular.
German Social Reading Investment
16 February 2026 (Borsenblatt, via Carlo Carrenho at Publishing Perspectives)
Frankfurt-based social reading app READO—now counting more than 500,000 active users—has secured a seven-figure funding round, notes Börsenblatt. Are you ready to abandon Facebook and move your bookshelf to READO?
| With e-textbooks, Massachusetts lawmakers seek consumer protections for students 13 February 2026 (New England Public Media) MA Lawmakers have proposed a special commission to look at the financial impact of e-books on students, considering the benefits, costs and resale limits of e-textbooks, as well as looking at the single-user access model and contracts that electronic textbook producers have with colleges and universities. |
| Report Suggests Piracy Accounts for Nearly a Third of the Italian Book Market, with Mounting Concern Over AI 13 February 2026 (Publishing Perspectives) For the first time, this year’s survey addressed a new element of the piracy threat—the “difficult-to-quantify losses caused by the use of AI-generated summaries and condensations of books.” |
| Wiley Enters Strategic Partnership with IT Group Virtusa 12 February 2026 (Intellectia) Virtusa has taken over Wiley’s technology operations in Sri Lanka in a multi-year managed services partnership to provide infrastructure and application services, aimed at accelerating Wiley’s technology transformation. |
| Microsoft Launches Publisher Content Marketplace for AI Rights 11 February 2026 (The New Publishing Standard) The early partners include Business Insider, Condé Nast, Hearst, The Associated Press, USA TODAY, and Vox Media – all news and magazine publishers optimised for velocity and volume. At the same time Amazon has been briefing publishing executives about plans to launch a content licensing marketplace that would allow publishers to sell their content directly to AI companies, positioning itself as a direct competitor to Microsoft’s PCM |
| Anna’s Archive Quietly ‘Releases’ Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Push-back 12 February 2026 (Torrent Freak) Anna’s Archive is generally known as a meta-search engine for shadow libraries, enabling users find pirated books and other related resources. The shadow library’s backend torrent index now lists dozens of new torrents containing approximately 2.8 million tracks totaling roughly 6 terabytes of audio data. This marks a significant escalation in the already historic standoff with the music industry. |
| Amazon Kindle Scribe has a new rival with an unbeatable price tag 11 February 2026 (t3.com) The InkPad One from PocketBook has a 10.3-inch e-paper display for a great price, and comes with a stylus and a premium build. This includes an aluminium frame and paper-like writing experience, as well as all the properties of a luxury eBook device. Where it mainly differs from the Kindle Scribe is in price – you can expect to pay just £270 for the InkPad One in the UK ($360 in the States). That’s more than £100 cheaper than the black and white Scribe. |
| Negligible ebook and audio book sales growth in 2025 11 February 2026 (Publishing Perspectives) December ebook sales were off 2.8% in 2025 from the previous year, and finished down slightly for the full year (0.3%). Digital Audio net revenues were off 0.8% in December 2025, with the format posting a modest 2.1% gain for the year. |
| Storytel Group Reports Record Profitability 11 February 2026 (Press Release) “Our integrated streaming and publishing strategy delivered record profitability and cash flow generation for 2025. As we enter 2026, we are focused on scaling this momentum by leveraging AI-driven innovation to lead the future of storytelling.” |
| Cashmere Appoints Former Elsevier and Perlego Executive Sue Hodgson as VP of Strategic Partnerships 10 February 2026 (National Law Review) Cashmere.io is involved in licensing content for AI. They work with major publishers, including Wiley, Harvard Business Publishing, and have received funding from industry leaders such as Ingram Content Group, Pearson, and Wattpad parent company Naver. |
| Pirate Group Anna’s Archive fails to respond to music labels’ copyright lawsuit 9 February 2026 (Music Business Worldwide) Shadow library Anna’s Archive has been formally placed in default after failing to respond to a copyright lawsuit filed by major record labels and Spotify over the alleged scraping of 86 million tracks from the streaming platform. |
| ElevenLabs, Valued at $11 Billion, ‘Doubles Down’ on Audiobooks 9 February 2026 (Publishers Weekly) Last week, ElevenLabs raised an additional $500M Series D funding, valuing the company at $11 billion, nearly double the $6.6 billion the company had been valued at in September 2025. It is hosting its annual summit for audio creatives and enterprises in London this Wednesday. |
| Nvidia says it didn’t use pirated books to train its AI models 9 February 2026 (Toms Hardware) Company asking for Anna’s Archive suit to be dismissed. Nvidia is pushing back against claims that it trained AI models on pirated books, telling a federal court in California that its alleged contact with the library ‘Anna’s Archive’ doesn’t amount to proof of copyright infringement. |
| US Schools race to meet web accessibility deadlines 6 February 2026 (K-12 Dive) The DOJ rule requires public entities such as school districts to ensure digital textbooks meet accessibility requirements. |
| Bookshop.org and Draft2Digital Partnership 4 February 2026 (Press Release) Through this partnership, self-published ebooks will be sold by independent bookstores, marking a transformative milestone for indie authors. |
| Why Some Of The Largest Book Publishers Are Hiring AI Engineers 3 February 2026 (Forbes) None of them is planning to use AI for editing or writing — at least for now. Instead, the job listings reveal that publishers are looking to adopt AI to run their businesses more intelligently, such as building forecasting models that can help predict which books will perform well and how they should be priced. |
| Danish Students Face Fines Over Textbook Piracy 2 February 2026 (Torrent Freak) After “awareness” campaigns that failed to move the needle for years, Denmark’s leading anti-piracy group is shifting to a more aggressive litigation strategy. The Rights Alliance confirmed it will begin filing civil lawsuits against individual students who are caught sharing even a single digital textbook. In 2025 57% of digital textbooks in Sweden were illegal. |
| Bookwire Names Ebook Giant Andrew Weinstein as U.S. Lead 2 February 2026 (Publishers Weekly) The leadership change comes four months after Bookwire’s acquisition by U.S. private equity firm Insight Partners. |
HarperCollins is using AI for book translations
2 January 2026 (Good E-Reader)
Harlequin romance books are now using AI for translations from English to French, and all in-house translators were fired.
Trade Publishing: Ebooks dropped from 17 percent to 11 percent in a decade
30 December 2025 (The New York Times)
Since 2016 ebooks dropped from 17 percent to 11 percent of trade publishing revenue, according to data from the A.A.P. that looked at the first 10 months of each year. But revenue from e-books this year was about the same as it was last year.
Centralized Audiobook Production and Distribution Platform for Independent Authors
30 December 2025 (Digital Journal)
The PublishMyAudiobook platform allows authors to manage audiobook production from narration auditions through final distribution preparation. Authors retain control of their audio rights and are not required to enter exclusive distribution agreements.
Some Audiobooks Are Outselling Hardcovers
29 December 2025 (The Wall Street Journal)
Though the pace of growth has slowed, audiobooks remain a bright spot in publishing.
Spotify acknowledges 300tb data scrape by book pirate Anna’s Archive
29 December 2025 (Chaos Zine)
The group estimates that Spotify hosts approximately 256 million tracks, with Anna’s Archive claiming to possess metadata for about 99.9% of this collection, along with roughly 86 million audio files that constitute approximately 99.6% of total listens.
Australasian Universities Strike Transformative OA Deal with Taylor & Francis
27 December 2025 (The New Publishing Standard)
The agreement explicitly permits use of licensed Taylor & Francis content with AI technologies for non-commercial research and education, subject to appropriate protections.
Denmark’s Library Renaissance: Record Lending Defies Digital Predictions
27 December 2025 (The New Publishing Standard)
For publishers, these figures challenge assumptions about library decline in the digital age.
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