After all that excitement about Bookshop.org, here finally is a story that doesn't feature them. It's been refreshing to see AI take a back seat in the news, but its developments are still with us and important to keep abreast of.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Most notably, this week saw the announcement of an integration between Anthropic's Claude and WordPress. It will, as far as I can gather, enable users to ask a chatbot to give them meaningful and actionable analytics to make it easier to use their website to do what they want it to do.
Amazon's Record Quarter
Last week also saw Amazon announce record sales figures. Sales in the fourth quarter of 2025 saw a 14 percent year-on-year increase to $213.4 billion. What drove that growth? Everything in the press release from Amazon centers on its cloud service AWS, which grew 24 percent, and its advertising growth of 22 percent.
What about where it all began, with books? Well, the third to last in the list of (I think forty-four) highlights reads, “Launched redesigned Kindle Scribe lineup with first-ever color Scribe. Lineup is thinner, lighter, and faster with new productivity features, including AI-powered notebook search.” So books, especially e-books, are still there. But only just, and only when “enhanced” by new AI features and a whizzy new piece of hardware.
Streaming Reading Goes Mainstream
I'll end on a more positive note with a story on Lit Hub that caught my eye. One of the world's most popular Twitch livestreamers, Kai Cenat, is apparently streaming footage of himself reading. Cenat has more than twenty million followers on the streaming platform and has decided, it seems, that what they want to see is him reading.
The reason for his reading is self-improvement. And while that was, for the Lit Hub author, the one frustrating thing about the move, I don't think many of us would actually deny reading is something that improves us (though most of us would do it whether it bettered us or not).
This is just another illustration of how deeply connected social media is to the actual practice of reading.
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