SOAG: BookBiz News & Commentary

July 7, 2025: Quirk Books Just Fired Its Editors | Tracking the Spread of Book Bans | When the Robots Read, Write, and Star in the Book

Quirk Books Just Fired Its Editors

Quirk was supposedly one of the “fun” ones. Playful covers, a little offbeat but still professional, and of course the name. The were supposed to be an indie-press to root for. Small enough to feel human, big enough to sell beyond the Amazon abyss. As of this month, Quirk has no editorial staff remaining. The company, which started the year with 23 employees, is down to 13 following a wave of layoffs and resignations. In June, after recognizing the employees' union, it announced a six-month freeze on acquiring new titles and laid off several staff members—seven of whom were part of the newly formed union.

The company says it’s all temporary. They say they’re reorganizing. But they’re also saying goodbye to everyone who made their books readable and publishable, including a children’s editor who was laid off the week before her parental leave started.

You can’t run a publishing company long term without editorial. There are style guides to conform to, messages to spin, markets to target. But you can sure try for a while if your plan is to coast on the backlist, squeeze freelancers, and reassure agents that everything is fine even while authors announce on social media that they’ve pulled their books because no one at Quirk has gotten in touch.

If this sounds familiar, Oxford University Press laid off the chair of its union-bargaining unit last year—a fifteen-year veteran—just months after workers threatened to strike. They also eliminated two entire U.S. teams, wiping out roles that had just been secured in their new union contract.

At StoryCorps, the nonprofit known for collecting American oral histories, five of nine staff laid off last October were union members, including the shop steward. The company claimed it was budget-driven. The union called it retaliation and filed grievances.

There have been more than a few others. Editorial teams slashed, union chairs fired, reorganizations announced the same week as bargaining breakthroughs. Voluntary recognition one day, pink slips the next.

Institutional knowledge does not survive a wipeout. There’s no one left at Quirk who can explain why a manuscript was greenlit, how it fits the catalog, what phase it’s in, or what it still needs. There's just a vague hope that things will stabilize in six months. Maybe the freelancers will carry it. Maybe the agents won’t walk. Maybe the goodwill hasn’t dried up. Maybe the contracts will hold. Meanwhile, the only thing still standing is a shell, waiting to see whether it can continue pretending to be a publisher without the people who made it one.

Tracking the Spread of Book Bans

The past year has been relentless for librarians, teachers, students, and publishers caught in the USA’s widening dragnet of book bans. Florida purged 700 titles in one school year. Texas expanded local board authority to police library shelves. Iowa ordered the mass removal of anything with vague references to sex. The Republican-controlled US Department of Education, now calls the book-banning wave a hoax.

That wave is now crossing the Atlantic. In Kent County, England, Reform UK council members voted to pull all transgender-themed books for children from public libraries. Their justification? The same line heard in countless U.S. districts: to "protect children."

From school boards to state legislatures to county councils abroad, the formula remains consistent: cherry-pick passages from books that feature LGBTQ characters, sex education, or racial history; strip them of context; declare them harmful. Often, a mere handful of vocal complainants are enough to remove a title from shelves that serve thousands.

Publishers have responded with lawsuits. Authors have organized resistance. Students, in growing numbers, have staged walkouts and formed underground book clubs. Meanwhile, in some places, school librarians face criminal penalties for putting the wrong book on the shelf.

This isn’t limited to the American South. Missouri, Utah, Iowa, and even districts in California and New York have seen similar attempts, often backed by national groups with coordinated playbooks. Yet while red communities and states grab the headlines, some blue states have begun passing laws to make it harder to pull books for ideological reasons. Illinois’ governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill that prohibits book bans in public libraries.

It was a bold move, but a drop in the bucket against the staggering number of banned titles. Over 10,000 book removals in one school year. The vast majority of the titles? Books by or about LGBTQ people, people of color, or both.

Our strongest defense is to buy and read banned books. Share them with your children. Pass them on to friends and the uninformed. Discuss them in your book club. Don’t cave to the fear; spread diversity, equity, and inclusion in your community.

When the Robots Read, Write, and Star in the Book

It’s happening faster than anyone seems able to track. Fake books. Stolen names. Audiobooks that sound like voicemail systems. Whole libraries of nonsense flooding the internet. The machine doesn’t care if it’s legible. It just needs to be uploaded.

This week, The Globe and Mail found a mess of AI-generated books on Amazon attributed to writers who had nothing to do with them. Margaret Atwood. Stephen King. Others, less famous, whose names were scraped and slapped on gibberish. The books came from a content mill called Grendel Press, which appeared to be using Google Doc templates and automated tools to churn out titles. One of the real writers caught up in it said, “It’s damaging. Not just to my name, but to the reader experience.”

These books weren’t hidden. Some were labeled bestsellers, thanks to obscure category tagging. And when you buy one by mistake, it still counts as a sale. The person behind it gets paid. Amazon's not going to step in; they got paid, too. It looked like they were going to prioritize quality for a while, but that doesn't seem to apply here.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that in Spain, nearly 60 percent of new audiobooks are now read by synthetic voices. These AI narrations often come with no disclosure, so listeners have no idea they’re hearing a machine. I've gotten pretty good at identifying them when I hear them so far, but the more advanced and ubiquitous they get, the more people accept it as "how things are now."

And that impacts human narrators. Contracts ended without explanation. Long-term relationships with publishers gone. One actor said, “You go from being the voice of a series to being cut overnight by a bot.” Another described watching their entire backlist of work replaced in a single update. Some publishers stopped returning calls altogether.

Audiobook narration has never been easy work. It’s long, demanding, and often underpaid. Still, it was consistent for many performers. Their work was distinctively theirs. Now, publishers are treating human voices as temporary placeholders for whatever software costs less.

China, oddly enough, is trying to get ahead of the problem. A new policy requires AI developers to prove they have legal rights to the books they're using as training data. That’s not normal behavior for the Chinese government, which hasn’t exactly been a champion of copyright in the past. But this time the protection seems aimed at domestic writers. A Ministry spokesperson said the goal is to stop “unauthorized use of literary works in large-scale model training.”

None of this is isolated. AI tools are built on human labor—books, narration, names—and in most cases, the people responsible for that work were never asked for, much less gave their permission. The companies know. The platforms know. It’s just not in their interest to slow down.

Stories like this get a quick headline and then disappears, yet the junk keeps piling up. There’s no quality control. No accountability. Just more fake books, more synthetic voices, more automated slop designed to sell before it collapses under its own weight.

If you’re a reader, check the narrator before you buy an audiobook. If you’re a writer, search your name every once in a while. If you’re in publishing, you’re making hard decisions inside a broken system. No one’s pretending this is easy, but don’t confuse what’s profitable with what’s inevitable. There are still choices. There’s still value in slowing down long enough to ask what kind of book world we actually want to build. After all, as I've said before, if there's no human creativity to feed AI anymore, that system will collapse too.