Digital lending through libraries continued to surge in 2025. Overdrive reports that lending through its Libby and Sora platforms grew by more than 10% last year. Audio continued its astonished rise, growing by 13%, where ebook lending grew at a more modest 3%.

Comic and magazine lending saw enormous growth, 31% and 22% respectively, while the total number of Libby app installs (people with the Libby app downloaded on a device) grew only 3%.

The most popular ebook of the year was Kristen Hannah’s The Women, and the most popular audiobook was Rebecca Yarros’ Onyx Storm. The most downloaded author was middle-grade titan Jeff Kinney.

Pop Quiz #1: There is one book among the top 10 audiobook checkouts of 2025 that is in the public domain. Can you guess what it is? ( Click here for the answer).

Pop Quiz #2: Can you guess which library system (aka city) circulated the most digital items in 2025? (Click here for the answer).

Every week, we round up the bestselling books of the moment, according to all the lists. Here are the titles topping the charts right now.

• It’s no surprise that Heated Rivalry and The Housemaid are two of the biggest books of the moment, considering their recent adaptations.
• What is a surprise is that The Correspondent continues to be a word-of-mouth bestseller, seemingly out of nowhere. It was recently announced as the first book picked for Katie Couric’s new book club.
• Other bestsellers this week include two more books from the same hockey romance series as Heated Rivalry, The Long Game and Game Changer—plus Dungeon Crawler Carl , The Let Them Theory, and Theo of Golden .

What isn’t new is that the bestseller lists continue to be very white. Some Indie Bestsellers you should know about are James by Percival Everett, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad—the #1 Nonfiction Indie Bestseller this week. —DE

Columbia’s Annual Winter Sale is currently in full swing , and it’s one of the best times to grab high-performance gear. Save big on favorites like the Suttle Mountain Insulated Jacket. Shop the sale now at  Columbia.com and outfit the whole family for less this winter.

In Elizabethan England, a budding playwright named Christopher Marlowe is working on his master’s at Cambridge when he begins disappearing for long periods of time. When he won’t provide an explanation for these truancies, Cambridge decides to deny him his degree. If thou dost eff around, thou shalt find out.

Then a totally normal thing happens: Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council intervenes and tells Cambridge to go ahead and give Kit his things, citing "good service" done for Her Majesty. And if we’re to believe the rumors, ’twas quite the service indeed: Kit Marlowe may have been in the employ of legendary spymaster Francis Walsingham, and his espionage might have uncovered an infamous plot to assassinate the queen.

Was Marlowe truly a spy? Was his death truly an accident? Was he secretly Shakespeare? Are none of these rumors as interesting as his subversive body of work?

🎧 Learn a little more about Shakespeare’s most important predecessor on this week’s Book Riot Podcast.

“I decided to re-tell The Great Gatsby not because I loved or hated it, but because it felt unfinished,” writes YA author Ryan Reynolds about his new book The Great Disillusionment of Nick and Jay.

“Its mythologizing of wealth and the American dream still rings with a longing that feels familiar today, yet so much remains unexamined. The task of re-telling it became like moving apartments: a chance to ask what deserved to be preserved, what could be questioned, and what might be discarded entirely.”

Douglass believes that retellings do something special: they admit that a classic is incomplete and that a classic is dynamic enough to offer something fresh when viewed from another angle. 

Among some of the books Douglass considers exceptional young adult retellings? 

• K. Ancrum’s Icarus, which “reworks the Icarus myth into a contemporary YA story centered on art theft and a teen’s slow loss of control”
• My Dear Henry by Kaylynn Bayron, which “masters the style of the original while looking at the story through queerness, framing it as a unique strength labeled dangerous by a society that treats being different as a crime”
• Enter the Body by Joy McCullough, which “uses unconventional form to shape how the story is told, insisting that reinvention requires structural disruption.”

“When authors reshape a story’s symbols to tell a different truth, both the classic and the canon are made better for it,” says Douglass.  

Check out the full piece and all of Douglass’s excellent YA retelling recommendations here.

Get your next three audiobooks completely free from  Audiobooks.com. Choose from over 500,000 titles, including the sensation Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid—the steamy sports romance behind the hit TV series everyone is talking about. Claim your three free audiobooks and start your free 30-day  Audiobooks.com trial today! 

Spotify reported a 515% increase in listens to the audiobook edition of People We Meet on Vacation in the week after Netflix debuted its adaptation.

The straight-to-streaming movie, based on Emily Henry’s second novel, is the first of several eagerly-awaited adaptations of her work. The viewer response bodes well for Henry’s book sales. Other notable data from Spotify:

• 800% increase in saves of the People We Meet on Vacation audiobook
• More than 300 user-generated playlists with “People We Meet on Vacation” or “Alex and Poppy” in the title 
• Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Gracie Abrams are among the top artists commonly found on these playlists

🎧 Catch a beachy vibe with the official playlist for People We Meet on Vacation , and listen to all of Emily Henry’s audiobooks, currently included with Spotify Premium.

The freedom to read hangs in the balance. In December, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal to high-profile book banning case Little v. Llano County , after the Fifth Circuit ruled that materials in public libraries are government speech and therefore not subject to the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

In addition to this case, there are several active lawsuits nationwide that can help inform thinking about whether and how the freedom to read may be established as an American right.

Keep an eye on these cases:

• Penguin Random House v. Florida – Publishers and authors are challenging Florida’s book-banning law (HB 1069), which a federal judge already called “overbroad and unconstitutional.”
• Penguin Random House et al v. Reynolds — Educators, students, librarians, and prominent authors join the publisher in a suit challenging Iowa’s 2023 education law (SF 496), which restricts LGBTQ+ discussion and allows broad book removals from school libraries. The plaintiffs argue that the law violates First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. The case is poised to play a major role in determining the future of school book bans and “don’t say LGBTQ+” laws.
• O.R. v. Greenville County – This South Carolina-based case argues that policies restricting or relocating “gender identity” books violate patrons’ rights to access information.
• American Library Association v. Sonderling —The ALA is challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle the Institute for Museum and Library Services. While a separate lawsuit by state attorneys general blocked the shutdown and restored grant funding, this case is still pending.

🚫 Read about more ongoing cases, and subscribe to our Literary Activism newsletter to stay informed.

Ready to make 2026 your best reading year yet? We’ve teamed up with our friends at Penguin Random House Audio to give one lucky reader a 12-credit bundle to  Libro.fm! That is a full year of audiobooks (one per month!) waiting to hit your earbuds. Even better?  Libro.fm  allows you to buy audiobooks through your local independent bookstore, so you can support your community while you listen. To enter for a chance to win, subscribe to the Audio Insider newsletter from Penguin Random House Audio.

Byron was an inveterate animal lover and had a monument to his first beloved dog, Boatswain, erected (with space for Byron included, though he was eventually buried elsewhere. And Byron wrote the poem inscribed on the monument, that ends like this:

"Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on — it honours none you wish to mourn:
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one, — and here he lies."

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🏆 A new book prize in the UK allows readers to choose the shortlist.

🛜 This is the best way to read the internet.

👩‍💻 Writer’s residency on your bucket list? Here’s how to get in.

❓ How many of these Shakespeare-inspired book titles do you know?

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