Severn House is being sold to Joffe Books by current owner Canongate Books. The sale is expected to be completed early next year. Canongate acquired Severn House in 2017. Joffe Books and Canongate have co-publishing ebooks together for the past five years. Canongate ceo Jamie Byng said: “Our close partnership with Joffe Books has enabled us to see first hand how successfully they publish. So when Jasper asked whether we would be interested in selling Severn House, it felt like something we should explore. “That Joffe is a like-minded independent publisher, one who cares as passionately about its authors and […]
Archives for November 2025
Supreme Court Allows Perlmutter to Stay In Copyright Office, For Now
In an unsigned order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court allowed to stand for now a September ruling from the DC Court of Appeals reinstating Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to her job. The high court will postpone any ruling on Perlmutter’s case until after they hear two similar cases already on the docket: The Trump administration’s moves to fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission and to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Oral arguments on the second case, Cook’s, are scheduled for January 21. While the order was brief and unsigned, you won’t be […]
A Moment of Thanks
Many years procrastination nudges the annual acknowledgement of the anniversary of the founding of Publishers Marketplace so close to the holidays that it naturally merges into a general expression of giving thanks, which always feels appropriate, and this year we are truly down to the wire. Earlier this year we quietly began the extended marking of 25 years of the Lunch / Marketplace combo buffet. Publishers Lunch began in the spring of 2000 on an unmarked date since I didn’t know that I was starting something, though domain records indicate the URL was claimed on April 4, 2000. It truly […]
Huckabee’s AI Copyright Suit Against Bloomberg Moves Forward
In the latest class action lawsuit over copyright infringement in AI training, a group of authors including Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel and former Arkansas governor, is suing Bloomberg in a class action suit. The plaintiffs, David Kinnaman, non-profit The Relevate Group (which holds copyright for one of Kinnaman’s books), Tsh Oxenreider, Lysa TerKeurst, and John Blase, as well as Huckabee, are authors of mainly Christian nonfiction books. They allege that the media company violated copyright when it used the Books3 database to train its finance LLM, BloombergGPT. “Using data from Books3 enabled Bloomberg to create its LLM faster […]
Books May Be Excluded from EU Deforestation Regulations
The European Parliament has voted to remove books and other printed materials from the EU Deforestation Regulations (EUDR), which would have forced publishers and distributors to show that products had not been produced on deforested land. The measure now must be agreed to by the EU Parliament, Council and Commission next month. The regulations would have particular impact on British and Irish publishers, as well as US publishers exporting into Europe. Additionally, the Booksellers Association called it an “existential threat” for Irish booksellers who sell books from British, US, and other publishers around the world. “This common sense support by the […]