Sales Surge for Dystopian Books

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Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The Handmaid’s Tale. On Tyranny. Men Explain Things to Me. These are the kinds of books folks are buying (at least those who are mortified by Trump’s win). 1984 was the book that flew off the shelves in 2016, when Trump’s habitual lying was terrifyingly novel. Seems like buyers now aren’t so much interested in a Big Brother comp as they are a Fascist one. Easy to see why.

Amazon Shuttering Kindle Vella

Good week if you have less than ideal news to break. Kindle Vella was Amazon’s attempt at a serial reading platform. There were tokens and bespoke terminology but the basic idea was to get bits of stories over time. This is a realm of content consumption in reading that never made sense to me (books as they are are great), but I also never would have tried the inverse for TV (releasing all the episodes in a season at once). I don’t recall every seeing a single statistic about users or payments or anything related to Vella, which should have been a tell.

Hachette’s Basic Books Launches New Conservative Imprint

I wondered about more conservative imprints happening in the wake of Trump’s win, but clearly Basic had Liberty in the hopper. I wonder if this would have gone forward if things had gone the other way. There was a time that an announcement like this might have sparked a walkout or something from employees, but it’s not 2022 anymore, baby.