Mergers & Acquisitions

The private investment firm KKR has agreed to buy Simon & Schuster for $1.62 billion. When the purchase closes, S&S will operate under current leaders Jonathan Karp and Dennis Eulau, and KKR promised to "support new growth initiatives" for the country's third largest trade publisher.

The private investment firm KKR, HarperCollins, and Richard Hurowitz of the investment firm Octavian & Company are all said to still be in contention to acquire the country's third largest trade publisher.

In what is likely a record price for an audiobook publisher, KKR, the private equity firm that owns RBmedia—and a rumored contender to buy S&S—is selling the company for an alleged $1 billion.

In a deal completed on June 30, Turner acquired the Conari Press, Bonhomie Press, and Woo! Jr. imprints—and with them a total of 589 titles—from Mango.

Christine Swedowsky has acquired the publisher from Libella Publishing Group in a management buyout. The World Editions offices in Amsterdam and London will close, and the publisher will be based solely in New York.

The upstate New York literary press has taken over publication of more than 100 Nomadic books in a deal that closed earlier this month.

In a bit of déjà vu, HarperCollins and the private equity firm KKR, which both lost out to Penguin Random House when Simon & Schuster was initially put up for sale, are reported among the leading contenders to buy the publisher this time around.

The French media company has received approval to acquire Lagardère following Vivendi's agreement to sell its existing book publisher, Editis. Lagardère is the parent company of Hachette Livre, whose subsidiaries include Hachette Book Group.

By acquiring the Washington, D.C.–based literary agency, WME signals a deepening focus on literary talent and specifically nonfiction, as well as a physical expansion into the D.C. area.

As part of its campaign to protect its members from the rise of large language models and other artificial intelligence tools, the Authors Guild has released four new model contract clauses concerning the technology. Earlier, the Guild released a survey of members that found that 69% of those that responded think their careers are threatened…