The July pick for Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club is Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace (featured in both our Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer anthology and our January Buzz Books Editors Panel.) Also making news is Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine, said to be have been approached by “multiple suitors” in recent months, the WSJ reports, including Apple. The company has hired bankers to explore a sale as a result of that interest, and those bankers (aka “people close to the situation”) suggest to the paper that “the company could be valued at as much $1 billion in a deal.” Apparently the […]
M&A
Egmont to Buy Bonnier’s Half of Cappelen Damm
Denmark-based Egmont has agreed to buy Bonnier’s half of their jointly-owned publishing house in Norway, Cappelen Damm, for NOK 1 billion ($120 million). The company was formed in 2007 by the merger of Egmont’s Damm and Bonnier’s Cappelen. Cappelen Damm had sales in 2020 of NOK 1.3 billion ($156 million), with pre-tax profit of NOK 91 million. Egmont Books had sales from its other primary unit, Lindhardt & Ringhof in Denmark, of 63 million euros in 2020 ($72 million), so full ownership of Cappelen Damm will add significantly to their size. Egmont sold Egmont Books UK along with their book […]
Acquisitions: Lee & Low Acquires Cinco Puntos
Lee & Low Books has acquired the assets of Cinco Puntos Press, comprising approximately 130 titles, and will become the publisher and primary distributor of their titles, which were previously distributed by Consortium. The acquisition adds the first adult titles to Lee & Low’s list. Cinco Puntos titles will remain under their own imprint, with the possibility of acquiring new titles under the imprint. Lee & Low will also reissue some out of print Cinco Puntos books. In a]the release, Lee & Low publisher Jason Low said, “We have always held the books that Cinco Puntos Press published in high […]
McGraw Hill to be Sold to Platinum Equity
Private equity firm Apollo Global’s long journey with McGraw Hill is coming to an end, with an agreement to sell the publisher to yet another private equity company, Platinum Equity. The deal is valued at $4.5 billion including debt. With debt at the end of 2020 of about $2.23 billion, it means the new owner is actually spending (or further borrowing) about $2.25 billion, and taking on about that much in existing debt. McGraw Hill’s planned merger with Cengage was abandoned in May 2020 after facing objections from regulators in the US and UK. Prior to that, the company had […]
Corporate: OverDrive to Acquire Kanopy
Building on their initiative to provide a broader catalog of digital content to libraries, OverDrive announced that it is acquiring video streaming service Kanopy from private equity investor L Squared Capital Partners. The streamer provides 2,300 academic institutions and public libraries with a catalog of over 30,000 films. Kanopy is used by millions of students and library patrons and is available on all major web, mobile and TV platforms. OverDrive CEO Steve Potash says in the announcement, “The Kanopy apps and streaming viewing experience are excellent services to further benefit our network of public libraries and academic partners.” The release […]
International: UK Publishes PRH-S&S Merger Review, PRH-Waterstones Terms Dispute, Bonnier Modifies Strawberry Stake
The UK’s Competition & Markets Authority has now published the full text of their decision in not challenging Penguin Random House‘s pending acquisition of Simon & Schuster. The answer is as we indicated from the start: S&S UK, with sales of only about £40 million, is just too small to make a meaningful difference. There is some nuance in how the CMA approached the decision that could interest people trying to anticipate how the Department of Justice will view the deal. The CMA writes that market share “estimates included in the parties’ internal documents for the United States” show PRH […]