On Spotify wrapped day, my social media feeds filled with users sharing their top listens of the year. They can share all sorts of stats about top artists, songs, and genres. But Spotify isn’t just for music anymore. You can also listen to podcasts and even audiobooks.

A little over a year ago, Spotify launched their audiobooks feature for Premium. Subscribers can listen to 15 hours of audio a month from a selection of over 150,000 audiobook titles. I have to admit, I love being able to pop over to my Spotify app and listen to just a few hours at a time without having to worry about purchases or credits. The interface is easy to use and find what title I’m looking for on any given day.

This year, they launched their new Audiobooks Wrapped editorial hub, a place where users can see the top audiobooks listened to in 2024. There, listeners can find the top audiobooks of the year and lists of editorial picks. While the majority of the titles are fiction, let’s have a look at their top 10 nonfiction audiobooks of the year:

I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, Performed by the AuthorThe 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, Performed by Richard PoeSapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Performed by Derek PerkinsDown the Drain by Julia Fox, Performed by the AuthorElon Musk by Walter Isaacson, Performed by Jeremy Bobb and the AuthorKitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Performed by the AuthorFriends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry, Performed by the AuthorThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, Performed by Roger WayneThe Woman in Me by Britney Spears, Performed by Michelle WilliamsThe Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest, Performed by Stacey Glemboski

Right out of the gate, we can see that the majority of these titles are incredibly popular backlist books that people keep picking up in print, so it makes sense that would extend to audio as well. But the list isn’t very diverse across the board, to put it mildly. In regards to the type of books represented, it’s a lot of self-help and celebrity memoir. I would have loved to have seen more science and history represented on the list.

If you scroll through their lists curated by their editorial team, you can find more diverse titles, especially in the fiction categories. In nonfiction, there’s more diversity in authors represented, but we still have a lot of celebrity memoirs and self-help. I appreciated Spotify’s efforts to broaden their list of bestsellers with additional titles, but, in the future, I would love to see more nonfiction categories curated by their editorial team. That kind of work helps broaden listenership to diverse books.

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

A Big List of 2025 Books By Women of Color

Electric Literature rounded up 48 books by women of color to look forward to in this fresh, new year. Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma is appearing everywhere and is on my reading list. I scrolled down for books publishing later in the year since those aren’t getting as much hype in these early months and a couple standouts for me include Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn, a satire about trans athletes, and Zeal by Morgan Jerkins, which is a multi-generational look at the legacy of slavery and has a banger blurb from Kiese Laymon. It’s easier to face down what’s gearing up to be a hard year knowing great books by great authors are coming to bring us some joy and remind us of our humanity.

S&S Launches Audio-First Imprint

Simon & Schuster is launching an audio-first imprint, Simon Maverick, with Jason Pinter (formerly of Polis Books) as VP and editorial director. The plan for the imprint is to mostly work with self-published authors to mostly produce original audiobooks. There are a lot of mostlys here because it sounds like this isn’t an all or nothing scheme when it comes to audio or authors–Pinter is staying open to opportunities printing works under the Maverick banner and working with books by S&S authors under other divisions. It’s not hard to see this as a business model where the focus on self-published works and audio formats allows S&S to quickly surface and mass produce unrepresented works in successful genres (ahem, romantasy) that come with a built-in readership ready and willing to hear their favorite story in audio format and capture fans who might not know of X author but have a big appetite for the genre. And if an audiobook takes off, Simon Maverick would be set up with a framework to quickly pivot to print. The imprint is already planning to publish at least 50 titles this year.

Monday through Friday, Today in Books highlights news from around the world of books and reading. In this weekend edition, enjoy a look at the stories we covered in-house.

New Mexico Becomes Fourth State to Introduce Anti-Book Ban Bill for 2025: Here’s What They Are (& What You Can Do To Help Pass Them)

Jenna Bush Hager and Random House Publishing Group Partner to Publish Emerging Writers

One of the trends we’ll see in book censorship over 2025 is the increased use of unprofessional, politically-driven book review websites like BookLooks to make decisions in professional library and educational settings. Just days after writing that—including an example from Warren County Public Libraries in New Jersey which happened at the time of writing—another library made headlines nationwide for their decision to begin using BookLooks to make library decisions. This time, it was Anoka County, Minnesota, public schools. Many online shared anger and frustration by this decision, while others talked about how glad they were to be in a safe state with anti-book ban laws. The latter, of course, being an attitude that we’ll see continue to increase in 2025, too, and it’s an uninformed one at that. Minnesota is among the states that have an anti-book ban law in effect.

BookLooks is the most well-known website for unprofessional, biased book reviews. That’s because it is a tool created by a former Moms For Liberty member and continues to be the tool they put their weight, energy, and time behind. I broke that story back in November 2022. Much like anything related to Moms For Liberty, though, BookLooks is not the be-all, end-all when it comes to these kinds of biased “review” websites. It is simply the most well-known because it has had the most ink put behind it; Moms For Liberty, likewise, takes up far more column space when it comes to book censorship than any of the hundreds of other large and small groups nationwide doing the same kind of work. Those groups, some of which are far more dangerous and destructive than Moms, just aren’t as easy or safe to meme online (certainly misogyny plays a nice sized role in this, too—no matter how appalling Moms For Liberty is, they get more play because it is easy even for “nice people on the left” to degrade women and women-adjacent projects).

Getting up to speed on the review sources being used and given legitimacy outside of BookLooks matters because in order to effect actual change, we have to be aware of the various ways these tools are being used and implemented. Certainly, get to know BookLooks. But if your knowledge ends there, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Even since the last time I did such a roundup of these biased online book ratings systems in November 2022, more have popped up and become favored by the myriad groups working to ban books in their local community schools and public libraries.

It might not feel good to give these sites any views by clicking the links. But it is vital to see how they’re operating in order to understand why they’re not worthy of being used in professional settings. Compare review sources that are long-running, professional resources by and for library and education professionals such as Kirkus, School Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and you’ll see why and how any institutional leadership should be embarrassed and ashamed to even consider their use. Even Common Sense Media, which is also inappropriate for use in making determinations about library and educational acquisitions, does a better job of providing information about books and materials in context than any of these slapdash sites do.

We’ll begin with a couple of the longer running sites, including BookLooks, and then dive into several other review sites gaining traction. Even if you have just tuned into book censorship, you’ll see that the titles that pop up on these sites are those which are quickest to then begin seeing challenges in public schools and libraries. Most of those complaints are simply copy-pasted from any of these resources. Book banners can’t even be bothered not to plagiarize their grievances—a reminder why libraries and schools need to update and strengthen their collection policies in such a way to toss out complaints that do just this. If college students are getting failing grades because of terrible AI detectors falsely identifying their work as AI, then your local right-wing instigator shouldn’t be able to steal the time and money of taxpayers for challenges that they just downloaded from some site on the internet and slapped their own name on.

What are the most popular library book checkouts from 2024? This is a tough question to answer, in part because not every library reports on the books being checked out, some do but separate out genres and formats (i.e., they pull out mystery checkouts from overall checkouts or count digital and print separately), and because the reports on top checkouts might show up at different times at the end of one year or in the beginning of another. But as we count down to the end of 2024, what can we gather about popular library books from the year based on the information that can be surfaced?

Looking at over 40 different “top library book” checkout lists from big and small public libraries across the USA, here are some of the most popular books of the year. What makes looking at public library book popularity fun is that it is year-agonistic, meaning that books published this year might sit alongside books published several years ago. Genre books tend to see more top books lists in libraries than in other outlets who compile or write about the year’s best or top books.

There are a number of interesting trends in the most popular books. Many are titles that were highly decorated in the previous year, and as always, genre fiction tends to do a lot of circulation in public libraries. Certainly, there are some books that pop up that have had their moment on BookTok, but that showing is not as strong as in last year’s roundup of most popular books in US libraries.

White authors tend to dominate in these lists, but the lists across the 40 libraries surveyed are more varied than what bubbles up to the top. This is, of course, a result of how publishing is still a predominantly white industry, and the books that tend to get bigger publicity and marketing around them are by white authors—it’s also worth addressing here that some of the biggest genre writers are long-time writers, so hitting the top of the most-circulated list as a newer genre writer can be tough. Again: that doesn’t mean they aren’t here or don’t circulate in libraries. It means they’re not at the tippy top.

Another element to consider in looking at these lists is the role that the digital platforms for library ebooks play themselves. Some collections will simply have more copies of particular titles than others, allowing for more checkouts of said titles. Likewise, whatever books are being promoted on those digital platforms via book lists or readalike lists (aka, what to read if you liked a particular title or movie) can impact what people borrow. It was interesting looking through hundreds of the most popular titles and seeing some surprises bubble up on the “top ebook” checkout lists. As you’ll see below, though, the top checkouts in print and ebooks have been collapsed into single lists.