Book Sales Rose 5.2% In Week Ended Dec. 19 (publishersweekly.com)

Congestion at the nation’s ports has largely disappeared as import levels have fallen amid economic uncertainty. That’s according to the Global Port Tracker report released Monday by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates. It found that while import cargo volume at the nation’s major container ports is climbing back from a nearly three-year low in February, it is expected to remain well below last year’s levels heading into the fall. “Consumers are still spending and retail sales are expected to increase this year, but we’re not seeing the explosive demand we saw the past two years,” NRF VP for supply chain and customs policy Jonathan Gold said.

The Association of American Publishers announced the final resolution of Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive, after Internet Archive declined to file a cert petition with the U.S. Supreme Court by the December 3, 2024 deadline. We are pleased that the Second Circuit’s September 4, 2024 opinion stands as the eloquent legal ending to this case, as it draws extensively on Supreme Court precedent and will be broadly impactful to other controversies, including artificial intelligence cases. “After five years of litigation, we are thrilled to see this important case rest with the decisive opinion of the Second Circuit, which leaves no room for arguments that ‘controlled digital lending’ is anything more than infringement, whether performed by commercial or noncommercial actors, or aimed at authorship that is creative or factual in nature. As the Court recognized, the public interest—and the progress of art and science that is the mandate of the Constitution’s copyright clause—is served best when authors and their publisher licensees can decide the terms on which they make their works available. We are indebted to Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, Wiley, their authors, and the many amici in this case who stood up for copyright, without which we would be a less inspired and less informed society.”

In a new report released this week, PEN America found 3,362 instances of books banned in public schools in the 2022-23 school year, marking a 33% increase over last year. And in an eyeopening finding, PEN officials found more than 40% percent of all book bans tracked by PEN America occurred in school districts in Florida—1,406 across 33 school districts across the state—with Texas a distant second (625), followed by Missouri (333), Utah (281), and Pennsylvania (186). "Amid a growing climate of censorship, school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation," the report, Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor, finds.