The Libby Book Awards finalists are announced. Mac Barnett is named U.S. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, ed. by Ada Limón, is the 2025 Seattle Reads pick. February book club picks include This Is a Love Story by Jessica Soffer (Read with Jenna and B&N), Junie by Erin Crosby Eckstine (GMA), and Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su (Amazon’s Sarah Selects). Clarkson Potter plans to reissue Martha Stewart’s 1982 book Entertaining, after it finds appeal with a new audience. Mat Youkee’s forthcoming Forty Days in the Jungle will be adapted for the big screen. Plus, authors weigh in on the pros and cons of blurbing.

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood leads holds this week. Also getting buzz are titles by J.D. Robb, Tessa Bailey, Jonathan Kellerman, Pam Jenoff, and Bill Gates. Jimmy Carter wins a posthumous Grammy for the audiobook Last Sundays in Plains. Finalists for the Gotham Book Prize are announced. Audiofile announces the February 2025 Earphones Award winners. This month’s Read with Jenna pick is Jessica Soffer’s This Is a Love Story. People’s book of the week is Too Soon by Betty Shamieh. Plus, February booklists arrive.

Garland County Library, AR; North Bergen Free Public Library, NJ; and Queens Public Library, NY, demonstrate the resourceful programming, robust partnerships, and care for their communities that has earned them Honorable Mention for the 2020 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.

You may have wondered why so many publishers are announcing pilot projects on open access (OA) publishing. The theme of Open Access Week (October 21-27), Community over Commercialization, hints at the reason: publishers want to engage with the community’s request for new models but can’t afford to make a loss on OA (and shouldn’t be expected to).

Strong mutual support among community partners, and a conscious shift over the past decade to investigate what each of its neighborhoods needs most, and then step up to those needs, has earned St. Louis County Library the 2024–25 Jerry Kline Community Impact Prize.

In contrast to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s characterization of fact-checking as unwanted censorship, most Americans actually agree that the U.S. government and technology companies should each take steps to restrict false information and extremely violent content online.

The longlist for Scotland’s Highland Book Prize and the shortlist for the Inside Literary Prize are announced. United States Artists announces its 2025 USA Writing Fellows. Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm is the fastest-selling adult novel in 20 years, having sold 2.7 million copies in its first week. A new “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” book is on the way. Independent bookstores across six continents will participate in the first synchronized Global Bookstore Crawl on April 26. Plus, Page to Screen and interviews with Imani Perry, Bill Gates, and Neko Case.

The National Book Foundation and the Sloan Foundation announce 2025 selections for the Science + Literature program: The Last Animal by Ramona Ausubel, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong, and Meltwater: Poems by Claire Wahmanholm. Chimwemwe Undi is selected as Canada’s parliamentary poet laureate. Wole Soyinka receives the Sharjah Lifetime Achievement in Literature Award. The future of libraries and arts agencies is unclear amid a federal funding freeze (that has been halted for now). NYPL releases a study on public libraries’ connection to their patrons’ well-being. Plus, new title bestsellers.

The Prison Library Support Network, established in 2015, works to meet the information needs of people who are incarcerated through a nationwide letter-writing project. Since the reference by mail program started in 2021, the New York City–based collective of librarians, graduate students, and activists has responded to nearly all of the 3,000 queries it has received from people in prisons across the United States, with the majority of letters coming from Texas, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Florida.