Mergers & Acquisitions

The Authors Guild is asking its membership and allies in the publishing industry to contact their senators to express support for the PRO Act, which would extend more collective bargaining power to freelance writers and authors.

The second largest trade publisher in the U.S. will buy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books & Media, generally considered the sixth largest, for $349 million.

Scheduled to launch sometime in the spring, BookClub is a virtual book club platform driven by author-led book discussions and designed for mobile devices.

Audiobook company RBmedia has acquired Booka, a Barcelona-based audiobook publishing company, and its full catalog of Spanish language titles.

Firebrand Technologies has been acquired by Media Do International, the U.S. subsidiary of Tokyo-based Media Do Ltd., a major e-book distributor. Firebrand founder Fran Toolan will remain CEO for at least the next three years.

Turner Publishing Company has acquired Los Angeles-based Prospect Park Books. The purchase adds more than 100 titles to Turner's backlist.

The Authors Guild, along with five other writers’ groups and the nonprofit Open Markets Institute, has sent a letter to the Department of Justice asking the government to block Penguin Random House’s pending acquisition of Simon & Schuster.

Economic uncertainty limited merger and acquisition activity in the book business last year, but there were still a number of significant transactions, including Penguin Random House's planned purchase of Simon & Schuster.

Endpaper Entertainment is a new content development company focused on producing original stories in a variety of media, formats and genres and is being led by Rich Johnson and Syndee Barwick.

John Wiley has expanded its presence in the open access field with the acquisition of Hindawi, a London-based scientific research publisher of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific, technical, and medical journals. Wiley paid $298 million for Hindawi, which had 2020 revenue of $40 million.