Mergers & Acquisitions
June 22, 2016 at 2:29 pm
LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK — June 21, 2016 — Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade-book publisher, has reached an agreement to sell Fodor’s, the preeminent travel-content brand, to Internet Brands, a leading Los Angeles-based online media and technology company, whose well-known travel websites such as FlyerTalk.com and Wikitravel.org attract 30 million monthly visitors.…
June 22, 2016 at 2:20 pm
Subscription audiobook and ebook streaming service Storytel has bought Sweden’s oldest publisher, Norstedts Förlagsgrupp, for £12.5m from Swedish co-operative union and retail group KF (Kooperativa Förbundet). The acquisition is the latest in a number of deals for Storytel in the company's bid to “speed up growth". Last month, it bought Danish ebook and audio streaming service Mofibo for £10m, and it also acquired Swedish publishers…
June 22, 2016 at 1:00 am
Alexander Street president Stephen Rhind-Tutt will stay on board, reporting to ProQuest Information Solutions’ general manager and senior v-p Rafael Sidi.
June 17, 2016 at 2:13 pm
Hachette has bought mobile games development studios Neon Play in a “substantial” acquisition. Hachette c.e.o. Tim Hely Hutchinson has said the acquisition “could be one of several” for the company in the app space. Neon Play was founded by co-owners Oli Christie and Mark Allen in Cirencester in 2010 and to date has created over 30 games, including Paper…
June 14, 2016 at 11:06 am
Last week, as an activity during the SSP conference, I participated in the Arizona State University Book Sprint to develop a text on the future of scholarly publishing. My contribution to the book sprint was fine. It wasn’t great. It was probably as much as one can expect from 35 minutes of trying to get…
May 26, 2016 at 10:00 am
New York, NY – May 25, 2016 – Macmillan Publishers announces the acquisition of Pronoun, Inc., a New York City–based technology company that provides digital book publishing tools, analytics, and services for authors and media companies. Pronoun’s author-focused platform encompasses automated digital book creation, distribution to major digital retailers, data-driven marketing tools, and a connected…
May 18, 2016 at 12:51 pm
I am both an insider and an outsider. I now work for the “big five” trade publisher Hachette, but I started working with ebooks fifteen years ago, and have made thousands over the years. Of course, there were things about EPUB that were maddening, but that’s just the way it was. I vaguely knew that…
May 17, 2016 at 2:13 pm
STM publisher Elsevier has acquired the largest repository and community for social science and humanities researchers in the world, SSRN, to accelerate its social strategy and scale the network up for the benefit of "the entire scientific ecosystem". Elsevier has not disclosed how much it paid for American research preprint repository and online community SSRN, but revealed it will…
May 12, 2016 at 2:12 pm
On Tuesday (May 10), roughly 350 attendees gathered for the annual pre-BEA conference produced by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). #IDPFDigiCon, as it’s hashtagged, isn’t to be confused with that “con” of a different demeanor, BookCon — the boisterous, mostly-YA consumer-facing entertainment event from Lance Fensterman’s ReedPOP on Saturday, featuring Veronica Roth and others.…
April 28, 2016 at 12:49 pm
The FTSE-100 education and publishing group Pearson is hoisting a "for sale" sign over a division it bought less than four years ago as it wrestles with growing pressure on global sales. Sky News understands that Pearson is exploring a disposal of GlobalEnglish Corp, which uses cloud software to teach English to employees of multinational…
