diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 7dd4086..58d2aa2 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -1,7 +1,24 @@
 ## v2.6.1 / 2014 Apr 8
 
-> **CRITICAL FIX** for v2.6.0 released 9 days ago. Please upgrade ASAP!
+**CRITICAL FIX** for v2.6.0 released 9 days ago. **Please upgrade ASAP!**
 
+### Problem
+
+Small strings weren't getting a proper UTF-8 encoding:
+`(.getBytes <string>)` was being used here instead of
+`(.getBytes <string> "UTF-8")` as is correct and done elsewhere.
+
+This means that small UTF-8 _strings may have been incorrectly stored_
+in environments where UTF-8 is not the default JVM character encoding.
+
+Bug was introduced in Nippy v2.6.0, released 9 days ago (2014 Mar 30).
+
+*********************************************************************
+Please check for possible errors in Unicode text written using Nippy
+v2.6.0 if your JVM uses an alternative character encoding by default
+*********************************************************************
+
+Really sorry about this! Thanks to @xkihzew for the bug report.
 
 
 ## v2.6.0 / 2014 Mar 30
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 98c9fde..8c3ef51 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 **[API docs][]** | **[CHANGELOG][]** | [other Clojure libs][] | [Twitter][] | [contact/contributing](#contact--contributing) | current ([semantic][]) version:
 
 ```clojure
-[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.0"] ; Stable
+[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.1"] ; Stable (please upgrade from v2.6.0 ASAP)
 ```
 
 v2.6 is a **major, backwards-compatible release** with: improved performance (incl. frozen data size), a new low-level DataInput/DataOuput API, improved support for headerless freezing, and 1-to-1 binary-value representation guarantees. See the [CHANGELOG][] for details.
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Nippy is an attempt to provide a reliable, high-performance **drop-in alternativ
 Add the necessary dependency to your [Leiningen][] `project.clj` and `require` the library in your ns:
 
 ```clojure
-[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.0"] ; project.clj
+[com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.1"] ; project.clj
 (ns my-app (:require [taoensso.nippy :as nippy])) ; ns
 ```
 
@@ -174,4 +174,4 @@ Copyright &copy; 2012-2014 Peter Taoussanis. Distributed under the [Eclipse Publ
 [commit history]: <https://github.com/ptaoussanis/nippy/commits/master>
 [Cider]: <https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider>
 [taoensso.com]: <https://www.taoensso.com>
-[Eclipse Public License]: <https://raw2.github.com/ptaoussanis/nippy/master/LICENSE>
\ No newline at end of file
+[Eclipse Public License]: <https://raw2.github.com/ptaoussanis/nippy/master/LICENSE>
diff --git a/project.clj b/project.clj
index 4d3f05a..cb5baf5 100644
--- a/project.clj
+++ b/project.clj
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-(defproject com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.0"
+(defproject com.taoensso/nippy "2.6.1"
   :author "Peter Taoussanis <https://www.taoensso.com>"
   :description "Clojure serialization library"
   :url "https://github.com/ptaoussanis/nippy"