Speed of Sound

Audiobook sales hit $2.43 billion in 2025—a 9% increase over 2024—with publishers reporting 43% more active titles in the format than the previous year. Wall Street Journal book industry reporter Jeffrey Trachtenberg has announced he is retiring from the paper after 37 years. And Baker Publishing Group, one of the nation’s largest Christian publishers, is launching its first dedicated children’s imprint. In other news, Utah has banned its 35th book, Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky, from public schools across the state, per Book Riot, and the University of Nebraska at Kearney has removed a textbook on human sexuality from course syllabi, claiming it contains “pornography,” per PEN America. Former Condé Nast exec Pamela Drucker Mann’s $80 million media startup, Run-A-Muck, is branching out into short fiction, the Wall Street Journal reports. The New York Times breaks down a newly unearthed short story by Edith Wharton, published in the Strand magazine Friday. The New Yorker’s Becca Rothfeld revisits Leslie Fielder’s controversial 1960 study of the American novel. And GQ pays a visit to Manhattan’s Substack House, where “media is still fun.”