Expanding on a joint venture created in the middle of last year, F+W Media has acquired The Martha Pullen Company, an ecommerce provider, event producer, and content company in the sewing and craft category, from Hoffman Media. Ceo David Nussbaum says in the release, “This is an important strategic acquisition for F+W, as we move more directly into the hard goods product fulfillment arena by offering these goods through our ecommerce stores. Now with the addition of a wealth of sewing information, instruction, and materials we can more fully serve the craft enthusiast community…. The acquisition represents our largest ecommerce investment to date and further expands our ecommerce expertise and capabilities with the addition of hard goods, and inventory and fulfillment operations.”
An international consortium of publishers and publishing associations worked together to win court injunctions in Germany blocking what they call “one of the largest pirate web-based businesses in the world”: www.library.nu and www.ifile.it, based in Ireland. The AAP says the sites “illegally acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted e-books and made them available for free, anonymous downloading on a site that disguised itself as a legitimate provider and alluded to serving as an authorized library for such content,” earning an estimated 8 million Euros in advertising and donations.
The plaintiffs included 17 publishers–among them Cengage, Elsevier, HarperCollins, Wiley, McGraw-Hill, and Oxford University Press USA, Pearson Education and Macmillan–and associations in the Netherlands, Italy and Germany as well as the International Publishers Association.