Tuesday 3 November 2026. 13 stories from across the book trade, about 4 minutes to read. Every link is free to read.
The short version
Deals & Acquisitions: Lakeside Book Company buys Bradford & Bigelow, its second book deal in a year
Market Developments: BookBeat grows revenue 13% with Germany leading the way
People News: Jasper Jones author Craig Silvey is jailed for seven months over child exploitation material
Events: Philippe Vasset wins the Prix Médicis for Dans les grandes lignes
Industry Buzz: The New York Times and three Tribune papers sue Brave over AI scraping
The lead
Lakeside Book Company buys Bradford & Bigelow, its second book deal in a year
The US printing giant has bought Bradford & Bigelow, which prints for the K-12, higher education and trade markets, and will keep its plants in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Newton, New Hampshire, open under Imanol Cortazar. Last December Lakeside bought the distribution arm of Baker & Taylor, and CEO Dave McCree says ’it’s such a great time to be a book printer’, reports Jim Milliot for Publishers Weekly.
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Market Developments
BookBeat grows revenue 13% with Germany leading the way
The Swedish audiobook and ebook subscription service grew revenue 13% in the first nine months of 2026 and now has more than 1.2 million subscribers. The same roundup covers an IFRRO survey in which more than 90% of creators say generative AI has hurt their earnings, reports Carlo Carrenho for Publishing Perspectives.
French indie Rockyvision says shrinking shelf space and rising costs squeeze small presses
The Lyon publisher of the film magazine Rockyrama and the Japan quarterly Otomo, which also has about 30 books, describes a ’systemic’ fall in points of sale alongside higher printing and distribution costs, reports Antoine Oury for ActuaLitté.
Read at ActuaLitté (France)
Deals & Acquisitions
Hunting publisher Éditions de Montbel changes hands for €140,000 after 80 years
Sylvain des Boscs, 47, has bought the hunting and nature house founded in 1946, which the Fougerolle brothers had run for 28 years, in a sale that closed on 25 September, reports Hocine Bouhadjera for ActuaLitté.
Read at ActuaLitté (France)
Chicago’s Unabridged Bookstore passes to its manager after 46 years
Founder Ed Devereux, who opened one of the country’s leading LGBTQ bookstores on 1 November 1980, is retiring and selling it to manager Shane Khosropour, reports Shelf Awareness.
Dungeon Crawler Carl and Worm, both born online, are getting comics in 2027
Vault Comics will print the Dungeon Crawler Carl webtoon from January 2027, and IDW Publishing is preparing the first official graphic adaptation of John McCrae’s superhero web serial Worm, reports Clément Solym for ActuaLitté.
Read at ActuaLitté (France)
People News
The 44-year-old young adult novelist, once shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and International Dublin literary awards, pleaded guilty in May to possessing and distributing the material. Judge Hayley Cormann backdated the sentence to 22 October, making him eligible for parole, reports the Australian Associated Press in The Guardian.
Read at The Guardian (UK)
Events
Philippe Vasset wins the Prix Médicis for Dans les grandes lignes
The Flammarion novel takes the French prize a year after Emmanuel Carrère. Spain’s Eva Baltasar won the foreign novel prize for Déclin et fascination (Verdier), translated by Annie Bats, reports ActuaLitté.
Read at ActuaLitté (France)
Publishing Scotland names the first 2026/27 recipients of its translation fund
The fund helps international publishers translate Scottish writers and has supported 284 titles in about 45 languages since 2015, reports Andrew Albanese for Publishing Perspectives.
The Poetry Foundation gives $1.52 million to 52 organisations
The grants go to poetry presses, journals and community groups across the US, reports Publishers Weekly.
Industry Buzz
The New York Times and three Tribune papers sue Brave over AI scraping
The suits, filed in Manhattan federal court on Monday, say Brave sells access to its index of more than 30 billion scraped pages to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI and Cohere, and lets browser users bypass paywalls. The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel filed alongside the Times, reports Jay Peters for The Verge.
Read at The Verge (US)
A copycat archive sold AI audiobooks of scraped AO3 fan fiction during the outage
ao3.life appeared while the Archive of Our Own was offline after a security incident, reposting works without consent, including deleted and private ones, and claiming to sell them as audiobooks. The Organization for Transformative Works says it is taking legal action, and writers were warned that the site’s payout process looked like phishing, reports Ash Parrish for Kotaku.
A Chinese court finds an AI-made animated series copied a written work
A court in Tianjin’s Heping district found ’substantial similarity’ between a protected text and an AI-generated ’manju’ animated series, and the case ended in mediation with the videos removed and losses paid. China Literature (Yuewen) counts more than 660 manju with over ten million views each, reports Nicolas Gary for ActuaLitté.
Read at ActuaLitté (France)