Self-Publishing platform Draft2Digital is introducing new minimum payment thresholds ($10-$100) for various payment methods that previously had no minimum amount (PayPal, Payoneer, check, etc.). This primarily affects independent authors who publish their books themselves. According to the platform representatives the minimum payment threshold will help reduce administrative costs, minimize transaction fees and streamline processing. Going forward, payments will not be processed until author's account balance reaches the minimum required amount.

Amazon unveiled Kindle Scribe and its color version, both with new AI features. One of these features allows users to search their notes in notebooks and get summaries using AI. Kindle Scribe received larger 11-inch display with an anti-glare coating, a new processor, increased RAM memory and a price starting at $430 (for the non-backlit version). Kindle Scribe Colorsoft features display technology that creates soft, eye-friendly colors like LCD displays. The company also developed a new rendering engine that improves color reproduction and ensures a fast, natural experience. Additionally, as Amazon notes, Kindle Scribe Colorsoft ensures several weeks of battery life. It's price starts at $630.

Onyx Boox has unveiled the Note X5 Mini with a 7.8-inch e-Ink display. The device includes DeepSeek artificial intelligence integration for text summarization and voice-to-text conversion. This is a black-and-white model so it offers excellent resolution. An active capacitive InkSense stylus is used for writing. The device has 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage, Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi. It's also equipped with four microphones and two speakers, making it suitable not only for listening to audiobooks but also for talking to DeepSeek's voice chat. The smartphone has a USB-C port for charging and a 2300 mAh battery.

Amazon has released a firmware update for Kindle 11th and 12th generation e-readers. The company has removed one of the last remaining methods for backing up Kindle books and removing DRM. Users are left with the option of using complex jailbreaking methods, which typically stop working after a new software update. The new DRM applies to all newly downloaded books, regardless of purchase or publication date, but does not apply to books for which the publisher has disabled DRM. Amazon is implementing these new protections to prevent users from downloading Kindle books locally, then using various methods to remove encryption and share the book with others. Earlier this year, the company removed the ability to download and transfer books via USB—one of the last remaining ways to download a book to your computer. Kindle for PC has been updated to prevent users of older versions of the app from downloading Kindle books. Even to read purchased books, the app requires an update and they can no longer be downloaded.

Apple has received a lawsuit from group of book authors who claim that the company trained its AI - Apple Intelligence - on large repositories of pirated ebooks, specifically Books3, a massive dataset containing nearly 200,000 illegally copied works. Lawsuits over AI training on pirated books are now involving significant sums of money. Recently, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of authors who accused the company of using their books to train its chatbot, Claude, without permission. In June, Microsoft was sued by a group of authors who claimed the company used their books to train its Megatron model. Meta also faced claims for allegedly infringing copyrighted material in AI training, but in the end won the case.

Libby, a popular online app for free access to books from your local library via e-reader or phone, has made significant changes to its hold system. In Libby, if the e-book or audiobook you want is already in use by other readers, you can place a hold on it. This means you join the queue and when it's your turn (the book becomes "available"), Libby will notify you that you can borrow it. How can an e-book be held? As it's not a physical book. The reason is that the library purchases the rights to e-books from the publishers with certain number of licenses (e.g., 3 copies). Previously, Libby allowed to "suspend" this hold for 7–180 days (thus you could stay in the queue but skip your spot while you are busy). Now the system has changed: if you suspend a hold, you must remove the hold yourself, otherwise it will simply "expire" in a year.

Amazon has released firmware 5.18.5 for the 11th and 12th generation Kindle, as well as Kindle Scribe and Kindle Colorsoft. It adds Kindle Assistive Reader (now available worldwide) - TTS system that uses natural voice to read books aloud. Kindle doesn't have speakers, but it does have Bluetooth. You can easily connect wireless headphones or earbuds for listening. You can also now change the font size in Kindle user interface (under the "Screen & Brightness" menu in Settings) and there's a new line spacing option: you can now adjust the spacing between paragraphs, words and characters (in addition to lines) under the "Font" tab in the Reading Settings menu ("Aa").

ILM software Calibre recently improved its Kindle drivers that allows to work with 2024 and newer Kindles that have a new file system called MTP. Kindle MTP driver now allows to mark all books sent to Kindle as personal documents, send books to subfolders inside the root folder, generate page number files (APNX), import KFX files, send cover thumbnails to Kindle Scribe and increase the size of these thumbnails. Also new updates include ability to set up a tooltip template for every column, color swatch in the results of annotation browser, support for embedded fonts in HTML output, Fetch news button that shows recently downloaded news sources, improved performance of the Piper Neural text to speech engine

GlobalComix, one of the leading digital comics platforms (for Android and iOS), has signed a distribution deal with Kodansha, one of the most iconic Japanese manga publishers. So the manga is now available on GlobalComix platform. There are currently 6,000 volumes available, including new releases timed to coincide with the release date and an extensive catalog of past editions. Users can now read all the modern popular manga sagas, such as Attack on Titan, Witch Hat Atelier, Vinland Saga, Silent Voice, MF Ghost, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and more. And for the first time, Kodansha's Young Magazine is coming out in English for readers in the United States.

For fans of book series, remembering plots and characters after a long break from reading between new releases can be challenging. The new Recaps feature in Kindle works a bit like the “Previously…” section at the start of a new series episode. The feature was previously available on Kindle devices and is now available in Kindle app for iOS. It includes thousands of new bestselling books for now only in English. To see if a series has Recaps, look for the “View Recaps” button on the series page in your Kindle library. On Kindle devices, you can select “View Recaps” from the three-dot menu in the series group.