Reading
Nearly everybody can read and there is one language, so anything printed anywhere can be read everywhere. Books are dear but not impossible, and a reading society is how twenty people afford forty of them.
Libraries
Every city has them, paid for the way the schools are: the Senate in Shining Reach, the guild council in Forgegate, the Registrars in Clearhold, the lineage halls in Eldershore, the harbormaster's dues in Stormharbor. The civic ones are free and they lend, since a book is dear rather than irreplaceable and a borrower's name sits beside his Station; a book lost is a book paid for, and a book lost and not paid for is a man explaining himself to a librarian who has already mentioned it to two other people. What stays behind the counter is what cannot be replaced. Subscription libraries carry what the civic ones do not and are where most people get their novels. Clearhold's archive is the great one in the world; the Academy's library is the one people actually work in; Eldershore's lineage halls hold the oldest records anywhere and will let you at them if you know somebody; Stormharbor keeps most of its memory in people rather than on shelves, which the other cities find charming until they need something checked.
What is read
Novels exist and outsell everything else. The only cities with an opinion about that are Shining Reach, where the salons rank philosophy above history above fiction and are faintly embarrassed that the city reads fiction anyway, and Clearhold, which cannot see the use of a careful account of something that did not happen and reads histories and published Galbrae matches instead.
Newspapers
In every city. A sheet costs a Braell or less, a Therplae keeps one for its regulars, and most people read the news rather than buying it. The printer's name is on the sheet, which makes a paper a Station: printing something false is a public failure anybody who was there can check, so corrections are printed prominently and without embarrassment, because owning a fault repairs standing and concealing it destroys it. The result is a press fierce in its opinions and careful with its facts. A signed argument is a man's own Oathbond on the page and nobody confuses it with a report. What a paper cannot be honest about is selection — which stories run and how prominently is where its politics live — and Shining Reach has several papers that report the same facts accurately and arrange them to opposite effect, so a serious person reads two on purpose. Foreign news is old news: a report from Eldershore reaches Forgegate a month later, and a paper prints the date the report was written beside it.