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Archives for December 2025
2025: The Year In Stories
In separate pieces, our year-end reviews have looked at the year in mergers, legal news, and corporate finance, along with our exclusive tally of The Best List, the consensus best books of the year–and in January we will finish up with the year in deals. Comprehensive as that sounds, it hardly covers everything worth remembering or noting from 2025. Last year we introduced this additional “year in stories,” not necessarily for the year’s biggest stories, but to call out pieces and coverage areas where the small but mighty crew at Lunch + Marketplace has brought an extra dimension to community […]
Speculating on Barnes & Noble’s Sales
If Elliott Advisors goes ahead and files for an IPO of Barnes & Noble and Waterstones in 2026, ceo James Daunt’s cheerful talk of the growth and turnaround at BN will finally get turned into real data. While we wait, a lengthy Fortune testimonial shares this: “According to sources, the combined companies generated approximately $400 million in profits on roughly $3 billion in sales last year.” Waterstones does file reports with the UK’s Companies House, and in their last reported full fiscal year, through April 2024, the company had sales of £528 million (approximately $712 million today), and operating profit […]
Judge Alsup Doubles Down On Opposing Fees for Additional Law Firms In Anthropic Case
Northern California District Court Judge William Alsup had already made it clear during the course of the Anthropic settlement that he opposed efforts by plaintiff’s counsel to enlist the help of other law firms — as publishers’ coordination counsel and authors’ coordination counsel. In a hearing while the settlement was awaiting approval, the judge had declared, “There will be not one penny paid to any lawyer except class counsel.” Nonetheless, earlier in December, the lawyers asked the court for $300 million from the settlement fund in fees, and proposed that a quarter of that would go to the various additional […]
Amazon Has Constrained “Ask This Book,” Though Authors Guild Believes It’s An Infringing Derivative Use
The Authors Guild has been communicating concerns to Amazon that its “Ask this Book” in-book chatbot infringes authors’ reserved rights: “The Guild is concerned that Ask this Book turns books into searchable, interactive products akin to enhanced ebooks or annotated editions—a new format for which rights should be specifically negotiated—and, given Amazon’s stronghold on ebook retail, it could usurp the burgeoning licensing market for interactive AI-enabled ebooks and audiobooks.” Amazon’s view is that the feature is “a natural language expansion of the search functionality that already exists in Kindle apps and for which no license is required.” Though it’s not […]
Textbook and Academic Authors Association Alleges that Sage Publishing Misled Authors On Anthropic Settlement
The Textbook and Academic Authors Association asked permission to intervene in the Anthropic settlement case “to present concerns to the Court regarding the administration of the settlement process.” Based on emails sent to authors by academic publisher Sage Publishing, the association alleges that, “The mass email contained misleading communications—including instructions to authors as to how to fill out the claim submission form in a manner designed to benefit Sage at the authors’ expense.” The association hopes the court will “direct class counsel to issue a curative notice to Class member authors…directing them to disregard communications they might have received from […]