The two companies announced in press releases that Rakuten will pay “a total consideration of $410 million in cash” to buy OverDrive. They say OverDrive’s EBITDA was $25 million for 2014, which amounts to a very hefty multiple of earnings that Rakuten is paying — but the Japanese-based company says that with the purchase it “expects the EBITDA of its global eBook business will be close to breakeven in 2015.” The deal is scheduled to close in April. OverDrive’s majority shareholder is the private equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which acquired that stake after making an unspecified “major investment” in 2010. (The specific […]
Archives for March 2015
Investor Talk: Harper Touts International Expansion, Eyes More Buys
We’re using the slow week to catch up on presentations made at a couple of media investor conferences earlier this month. HarperCollins CFO Bedi Singh appeared at a Morgan Stanley conference in early March, where he underscored the better than expected results already coming from last year’s Harlequin acquisition. “Harlequin is going quite well; the integration is going much better than we had planned,” Singh said. “The international platform has been a real asset when we have been negotiating book deals.” Singh indicated they have already extracted “over $20 million of synergies coming out of that deal,” even though “we didn’t […]
Scouting the Bad and the Very Bad in Kindle’s Reader-Powered Platform
Katy Waldman at Slate has a look at some of the featured titles in the recent Kindle Scout initiative, where readers are supposed to sample excerpts from unpublished manuscripts and recommend them for publication through Kindle Press. Her theme is: “This kind of writing is unabashed. It is breathtakingly, gloriously bad. And it raises a question: What do we mean when we talk about bad books?” In particular, Waldman writes, “I am not here to talk about the democratizing heroism of self-publishers and crowdsourcers. Or about the growing centrality of the consumer, who is able to customize her reading experience by […]
People, Etc.
Christian Lorentzen will join New York Magazine and Vulture.com as book critic, writing book reviews as well as “longer assessments and essays on books and writers and shorter commentary on a wide range of literary matters.” Lorentzen will start writing for the magazine in April and increase his output in June when he returns to New York from London. He was most recently senior editor at the London Review of Books, where he will remain an editor-at-large. Literary agent Maria Ribas has joined Stonesong, representing nonfiction in the areas of cooking, home, health/diet, personal development, business, psychology, and memoir. Ribas had […]
KDP Fund for February: Down Slightly Overall, Up Slightly Per Book
In their monthly retroactive declaration of how much KDP Select authors earned from Kindle Unlimited borrows for February, Amazon financed a total pool of $8 million — down from $8.5 million allocated in January. That’s the first time Amazon has reduced the monthly pool. The fee paid per borrow rose slightly, however, to $1.4066 per book — compared to just under $1.38 for January. That means overall borrows declined from about 6.175 million in January to 6.043 million in February. Needless to say, authors will be watching closely to see if this is a one-month aberration, or if monthly borrows have […]
People, Etc.
Stephanie Davis joins the Crown Publishing Group as marketing manager, Clarkson Potter and Harmony. Previously she was assistant marketing manager at St. Martin’s. Jandra Sutton has joined PR by the Book as digital media coordinator. Previously, she was marketing director with Turner Publishing Company. Rachael Small has joined Europa Editions as publicist. Previously she was a translation quality manager and before then, publicity assistant at the Book Department of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy. Erin Young has joined Dystel & Goderich Literary Management’s West Coast office as assistant to Michael Bourret after working as an editor at two […]