Five Things: June 25, 2026

NOTE: I’m attending ALA this weekend with Words & Money, wearing my “occasional journalist” hat, so if you see me around, say hello! Also, my last “newsletter” was linked to and shared by several colleagues, leading to an unexpected influx of new readers. If you’re one of those new readers — whether via email, social, or RSS — welcome! And new or old, thanks for reading.

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_ONE

Borg Complex, technofatalism and think-hostility | Per Axbom

Resistance can be boundlessly beautiful. And it has nothing to do with ignorance. It has everything to do with a desire to think for yourself. To be given time for reflection. It is rooted in care for yourself and others. The charlatans reading fortunes in AI slop are not revealing the future — they want to secure their own dominance and have you pay for it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably have to say it again multiple times while I’m at ALA: there’s nothing inevitable about “AI”.

The “inevitability” narrative is formidable and relentless, and it might feel pointless to continue resisting and challenging the vague and mundane use cases and shifting goal posts when it seems like everyone else has given in — but that’s not true at all. There are plenty of smart people who are thinking, writing, and speaking critically about “AI” and engaging with their work is what helps keep me informed and confident in my own continued resistance.

Axbom’s essay is another one for your consideration. (And if you want a good laugh, check this one out, too.)

Resistance is never futile. More importantly, it can be contagious.

__TWO

In 2026, Less than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click | Rand Fishkin

Don’t take that the wrong way — your SEO still matters as much or more than ever before, it just won’t earn you traffic the way it once did. Traffic can fall precipitously even as revenue rises. Our belief and advice is to invest in Zero Click Marketing: earning influence and growing your brand’s awareness without requiring a visit to your website.

If declining search traffic is significantly disrupting your business, you’re either brand new to digital marketing, or you’ve been around long enough to have seen this movie a few times already and decided to ignore the signs anyway. Again.

Even at the height of SEO’s dominance, the sustainable winners combined technical best practices with useful content (or products, or services) that served a clearly defined audience’s needs. That content (or product, or service) might also be shared organically (aka, word of mouth), increasing its value and reach, and savvy marketers understand how to measure both ROI and VOI to ensure their efforts are working.

SEO hacks that combined relevant keywords with copycat advice, listicles, and quizzes — powered by the same “content marketing playbooks” that are being summarized by chatbots to create “productive” alternatives to expertise — were all shortcuts for companies with inferior products and services, or media business models that relied on driving clicks from borrowed eyeballs for programmatic advertising. Tomfoolishness all the way down!

Now we’re seeing a similar industry developing around “AI” hacks that are a combination of brand marketing fundamentals and lazy automated shortcuts, but the magic pixie dust has a new label.

If you don’t actually know your audience and you don’t have a quality product or service to offer that audience, there’s no chatbot that can save your business from your own willful ignorance.

___THREE

The LLM You’re Optimizing For Doesn’t Exist | Kerry Cunningham

If you’re optimizing your content to perform well in AI-generated responses, you’re implicitly assuming there’s a stable relationship between what you publish and how an LLM represents you. That assumption is borrowed from SEO, where it more or less holds. It doesn’t hold here.

I’ve been enjoying Cunningham’s work debunking sacred B2B marketing myths ever since I listened to his A History of Marketing episode, and his take on LLMs is an important extension of that work, because so much of the advice I’ve seen about AEO / GEO is a weird combination of “No duh.” and “Nope.”

People who love prompting their favorite sycophantic chatbots until it gives them the answers they want should understand this intuitively, but they’re more likely to be the ones making the mistakes Cunningham identifies here.

And for anyone blindly jumping into generic “zero click marketing” tactics, it’s an invaluable reminder that truly understanding your audience is the critical difference between doing good marketing and being a good mark.

____FOUR

Librarians Want the Big Five Publishers to Negotiate ‘Fair’ Digital License Terms with Libraries. Here’s What That Might Look Like | Michael Blackwell

It’s been said that a reluctantly agreed upon middle ground that wholly pleases nobody is the essence of compromise. In that spirit, the ReadersFirst Working Group’s proposed terms are a good faith attempt to balance the advantages digital offers, while considering the market as a whole.

A recurring theme in conversations I’ve had about the “Big 5” and library ebooks over the past year is why they’re being so aggressive about the relatively milquetoast bills that appear to be gaining steam. Contrary to the AAP’s misinformation campaign, these bills don’t undermine copyright nor mandate specific terms, they simply ask for the opportunity to actually negotiate those terms as partners rather than adversaries.

Blackwell offers one of the most coherent takes I’ve seen on the situation so far, and I’m particularly glad he called out Macmillan’s misguided embargo in the context of “One Size Does Not Fit All.”

Back in 2019, many smaller libraries didn’t object to Macmillan’s eight-week embargo of new releases because it included a notable concession that was often ignored or downplayed in most coverage: perpetual ownership of a single copy from the date of release. Libraries with smaller budgets were already used to having long waitlists for popular titles, so the appeal of having one copy of an ebook they never had to worry about disappearing, or needing to periodically renew, offered more value than moderately lowering hold ratios on the most popular new ebooks.

Of course, Macmillan’s mistake was believing that what worked for smaller libraries would work for major systems and consortia with much larger populations and materials budgets. Having a single copy of one ebook for millions of NYPL patrons during the first eight weeks of its availability everywhere else was an acute pain point that perpetual access to that same copy didn’t come close to offsetting.

Ensuring friction has always been the Big 5’s primary goal for library lending, though — especially with ebooks — even when that means ignoring readers’ preferences and demonizing one of their most important partners for reaching and engaging those readers.

Unfortunately, what Blackwell doesn’t address is the fact that libraries have options beyond the Big 5, and there’s no actual obligation for them to keep diverting so much of their materials budgets to ensuring as many people as possible can read the latest James Patterson release a little sooner. Publishers willing to offer fairer terms for ebooks DO EXIST, and the majority of them publish books that are as good, or even better, than the ephemeral Big 5 bestsellers libraries help create buzz for and then spend too much of their materials budgets on.

Librarians are the original book influencers and have the power to influence the demand curve, while platforms like The Palace Project are actively working with a growing range of publishers who support alternative licensing models —including the holy grail of full ownership.

The “Big 5” have already proven they’re willing to lose ebook market share to competition they don’t value, even if it means disrespecting readers’ interests and preferences. With the best case scenario for any legislative solution still several years away, libraries should prioritize partnering with publishers who appreciate their mission to serve ALL readers, and start aggressively pursuing those conversations instead.

[Related-ish: In honor of Brian O’Leary’s retirement from BISG, I might have to get my favorite quote of his tattooed on my other forearm: “Make progress among the willing.”]

_____FIVE

A third of Americans say they’re reading fewer books | Fred Backus

This CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2,023 U.S. adults interviewed between June 2-4, 2026. The sample was weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to gender, age, race, and education, based on the U.S. Census American Community Survey and Current Population Survey, as well as 2024 presidential vote. The margin of error is ±2.8 points.

I’m spotlighting the methodology here rather than the takeaways, because the former is what makes the latter statistically relevant — or not — and it’s rarely mentioned in press coverage as important context. Compare it to the Authors Guild’s methodology for their recent survey, which is buried in a PDF rather than publicly posted alongside their controversial takeaways:

• Online survey fielded October 21 to November 6, 2025
• Past month book readers, read 1+ books in last month, 4+ books in last 12 months
• Participants recruited at random from national consumer panel
• Total responses = 1,998 book reader and/or audiobook listeners 18 and older
• Readers asked about books read in last month as past Codex data has shown that many readers do not recall detailed information from prior months.

There are no details about the consumer panel respondents were drawn from; no apparent controls for representation beyond an arbitrary threshold for reading engagement with books and/or audiobooks; and, for the real research nerds, no margin of error is given.

Also noteworthy is the timeframe of both studies, and when their findings were released. CBS News/YouGov released their findings a mere two weeks after closing their survey, while the Authors Guild inexplicably took seven months to release their arbitrary snapshot from last year, choosing to paint libraries as the enemy of authors at the worst possible time.

Or, maybe was it the best possible time? ¯\_ (?)_/¯

______BONUS