Ebook Creation software Vellum has released an update with some new features that give authors deeper insight into something every writer tracks: word count. Vellum has long displayed book’s word count, but now author can explore it visually with the new Word Count Graph. It displays the word count for each chapter and how it compares to the average, making it easy to analyze pacing, outliers and your book’s overall rhythm. The graph also offers a Running Total view, showing cumulative word count across the book. This view includes a marker indicating where your word count reaches 50%, so you can easily spot the midpoint.

Self-publishing provider Lulu.com has shared new data on its personalized book printing service. Lulu's platform delivers scalable, highly personalized printing powered by automation and artificial intelligence. The company says that such products as personalized meal planners, exercise guides, children's books featuring a child's name and other similar books are becoming widely used by consumers. Recent data from Lulu also shows that among companies using five AI-powered personalization books, the top discovery companies sold over 167,000 personalized copies within 124,000 orders in the past year alone. This surge reflects a broader shift in the market: personalization has moved beyond a niche tactic and has become a core driver of revenue growth and development.

Zotero 9, the new version of the bibliography management software, has been released, introducing Read Aloud, which reads your documents in high-quality, natural-sounding voices. It works with PDFs, EPUBs and even webpage snapshots. While listening, you can move forward or backward through paragraphs or sentences (Option/Alt-click or Option/Alt-left/right) and you can start reading from a specific location by clicking in the left margin or right-clicking and selecting Read Aloud. The Annotate Sentence button will automatically highlight or underline the last sentence you heard and keyboard shortcuts let you quickly move, expand or delete a new annotation. Your last reading position is saved and synced across devices, so you can pick up where you left off on any device.

The FOLIO Open Source community has released a new version of the FOLIO library services platform, Sunflower. It brings significant changes to the architecture of the FOLIO library services platform (LSP) and also includes many exciting improvements. The main architectural change is the transition from Okapi to the Eureka platform, which adds support for interactions between modules (sidecars) and components for the application manager, tenant manager and tenant access manager. In addition, the Sunflower release adds more intelligent and flexible bulk editing of records, improved invoices and organizations that include a full change history, which increases financial transparency and improves vendor management, simplified inventory management, full support for COUNTER 5.1 for collecting, exporting and uploading JSON and improvements to working with serial numbers and receipts.

The latest update of Kindle Scribe firmware added a new "smart shapes" feature that lets you draw shapes in notebooks. You can add squares, circles, triangles, straight lines and arrows to notebooks and the program can automatically create perfect shapes from rough hand-drawn sketches if you hold the pen down for a second after drawing them. You can resize and rotate shapes, as well as copy and paste them anywhere. Five different line thickness settings are available and you can make them even thicker using a highlighter or marker. Smart shapes are only available in notebooks; they are not available when adding notes to PDFs or eBooks.

Amazon will officially discontinue support for the current Kindle desktop app on June 30th, but will release a "new and improved" Kindle app for Windows 11 later this month, available in the Microsoft Store. This will allow you to still access your Kindle library from Windows computers. For most users, this will be a minor inconvenience, requiring the installation and setup of a different app. If you still have unsaved Kindle ebooks, now is the time to do so before Kindle desktop app is discontinued. The new version will likely include security improvements that will block existing DRM removal methods.

Onyx Boox has released firmware version 4.2 for the Note Air 5C and Go 10.3 Gen 2 Lumi. The main feature is image smoothing, which significantly improves image viewing quality. Other new features include: note page zoom settings, calendar syncing (Google/Outlook), the ability to disable "Anchor" in NeoReader, a floating toolbar in notes, visualized tracing with the pixel eraser and a fix for jitter when drawing straight lines with InkSense styluses (a dedicated toggle has been added to address these issues and smooth out your strokes).

Amazon is introducing significant restrictions in Kindle Unlimited for magazines in the US. Automatic delivery is ending: only the issues you select will be added to your library and automatic delivery of future issues will no longer be available. Magazines rented before April 22, 2026, will be removed from your Kindle library on July 22, 2026. Any magazines in your library at the time of the transition will enter a grace period from April to July and then be removed from your Kindle library. If you want to keep any of these issues, you can rent them individually in the new interface after April 22, as long as they remain available in Kindle Unlimited catalog. Anything rented in the new interface will remain in your library.

Kobo has released a firmware update for Kobo Libra 2 that improves Bluetooth connection stability when using Kobo Remote. Following the release of Kobo Remote, there were numerous reports of intermittent connection drops with Kobo Libra 2 and this update attempted to fix the issue. However, even after the update, there are still reports of excessive battery drain when using the remote. Kobo also plans to release a similar update for other older models. It's possible that older Bluetooth models have specific quirks that cause them to consume more power.

The updated Kobo app for Android and iOS has significantly improved personalized book recommendations. After completing a onboarding quiz designed to identify books you're interested in, the app instantly displays recommendations right on the home screen. It's not yet clear whether you only need to complete the quiz once or whether the home screen will automatically populate with ebook data and update every few days or weeks. Also, there doesn't appear to be an option on the home screen to let Kobo know you're not interested in a particular book or genre.