Rakuten has an agreement to sell OverDrive to private equity firm KKR, under the direction of Richard Sarnoff, with the deal expected to close by the end of January. The digital reading and media platform for libraries and schools should pair well with audiobook publisher and platform RBmedia, which KKR bought in 2018. (RBmedia also has a platform that provides digital content to libraries.) The private equity firm bought both OverDrive and RBmedia through its KKR Americas XII Fund. The purchase price was “determined rationally by mutual agreement of both parties” but not disclosed for now. Rakuten said in their […]
Holiday Sales Look Steady Ahead of Final Shopping Days, As 2018 Titles Lead
NPD Bookscan reported print sales for the week ending December 21 of approximately 32.96 million units, covering all but the final three important days of holiday sales. That followed sales of 26.9 million units the week before. That’s on par with or slightly behind the two full pre-holiday weeks from 2018, when print sales were approximately 33.7 million units in the last full sales week, and 27 million units the week before. The big difference this year is that there are no new books comparable to Michelle Obama’s memoir pulling the market. A year ago in the last full holiday […]
Company News: LSC Delisted By NYSE, China’s Publishing Chill, More on Dreamspinner
As anticipated, LSC Communications was kicked off the New York Stock Exchange, which is designed for companies of scale. Trading on the NYSE was suspended at the end of last week, since the company failed to maintain a market cap of at least $15 million for over 30 consecutive trading days. They also failed to maintain a share price of $1 or more. LSC now trades on the OTCQX Best Market, falling another 15 percent in the first forty-five minutes on Monday, down to about 31 cents a share, for a market cap of a little over $10 million. China […]
People, Etc.
Jessica Renheim and Toni Kirkpatrick have joined Crooked Lane Books and Alcove Press as acquisitions editors focusing on crime and book club fiction. In the Queen’s New Year’s Honors list, literary agent Felicity Bryan was given an MBE for services to publishing, and novelist Rose Tremain was made a Dame. Sourcebooks has acquired two adult mystery series, a YA trilogy, and a middle grade series from independent press Dunemere Books. They will relaunch them in 2020 and plan new titles for each series. Feminist writer and author of the 1998 book Life After Birth, Kate Figes, 62, died on December […]
Briefs
Journalist and novelist Ward Just, 84, died Thursday of Lewy body dementia. His novel Echo House was a National Book Award finalist and his novel An Unfinished Season was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Romance novelist Johanna Lindsey, 67, died on October 27 in Nashua, NH. She wrote almost 60 novels that sold more than 60 million copies. PW named author Dav Pilkey as its “person of the year,” writing that “with sales of his Dog Man series skyrocketing in 2019, Pilkey is doing more to excite kids about reading than any author since J.K. Rowling.” The […]
Take Us With You
One more reminder: Our custom PM News App is a great way to monitor as much of the news and deals as you care to from your mobile devices while you are out of the office for the holidays. It provides easy access to all of our most frequently updated items, which can be read “in app” without having to link back to the site. (We will be keeping an eye on things throughout the holiday stretch and reporting and clipping links as warranted — as well as processing deal, posting jobs, and more.) To load the app just point […]