Germany’s Verlagsgruppe Random House will launch a new imprint, Penguin Verlag, sometime in 2016, the Bookseller reports. The imprint, to be run by Random House Germany publisher and managing director Thomas Rathnow, will publish both fiction and non-fiction, original trade and mass-market paperback editions as well as paperback reprints of books that have previously been published in hardback by various German Random House imprints (including Jonas Jonasson’s bestseller The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden.) The idea is that Penguin Verlag will “publish brands” and that Penguin, according to Rathnow, represents “the convergence of high quality and popular commercial […]
Finance
Corporate: Pearson Sells Family Education Network Sites, Harlequin Launches Audio
Pearson has sold their Family Education Network — the group of websites for kids that includes Poptropica and Funbrain — to UK-based private equity company Sandbox Partners for undisclosed terms. Founded last year, Sandbox is run by former president of Pearson English Bhav Singh. Pearson spokesperson Brendan O’Grady said the sale is part of a “shift to focus on the Pearson products and services with the biggest potential impact on learning outcomes.” But he noted Pearson will still use Poptropica characters in a number of their English-language learning products. Author Jeff Kinney, who co-founded Poptropica while working at FEN and continues as Poptropica’s creative […]
Paulson Will Pull More Money Out of HMH with Secondary Offering and Share Buyback
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s largest shareholder John Paulson and his associated investment funds will be cashing out another couple of pieces of his investment. The recently announced $300 million in stock repurchases announced by the board apparently includes a deal to buy $150 million of stock directly from Paulson’s companies. The price per share for that side agreement is pegged to a secondary offering to the public of additional shares controlled by Paulson. That prospectus, just filed with the SEC, proposes selling up to roughly 12.16 million shares — or about 8.5 percent of shares outstanding. As with the first public offering of […]
BN Files to Allow Microsoft and Pearson to Sell Their Shares; BAMM Trades Above Buyout Offer
Barnes & Noble filed paperwork with the SEC to prepare the way for Microsoft and Pearson to be able to sell the roughly 3.340 million shares of the bookseller’s stock they were given as part of the deals to buy out their stakes in Nook Media LLC. Those shares comprise a little more than 5.2 percent of Barnes & Noble’s total available shares. A sale of these shares was expected when BN made the deals to end their Nook Media partnership, though neither Microsoft nor Pearson has announced plans for a secondary offering of their shares yet. In other bookseller […]
Bertelsmann Profit Rises In First Quarter, As Attention Turns to Possible PRH Buyout
Bertelsmann issued a brief first quarter trading update (in the European style), with sales just above flat at €3.92 billion and operating EBITDA up 6.7 percent to €463 million (from €434 million a year ago). Net income rose to €143 million from €106 million last year. Though not mentioned in the report, bear in mind that — as we underscored earlier — that the contribution from Penguin Random House is supercharged this quarter by the strong dollar (and British pound, relative to the euro). CEO Thomas Rabe says in the short release: “The year started well for Bertelsmann. We achieved […]
Renewed Talk of A Possible McGraw-Hill Education IPO
On Friday Reuters reported that Apollo Global Management, the owners of McGraw-Hill Education, are once again talking to investment bankers about taking the publisher public — possibly by the end of the year. zthe “underwriter roles will not be finalized before the summer, four people said this week,” though, and the story touts the idea of an offering “potentially valuing the textbook company at around $5 billion.” But that’s a seller talking, rather than buyers. Remember, however, that talk of a McGraw-Hill Education IPO first surfaced in the press about a year ago. In that article — whose “sources” appeared to be bankers looking […]