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 […]
Finance
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 […]
People, Etc.
Eerdmans has hired Lil Copan as senior acquisitions editor, general trade. She was at Abingdon Press most recently. A group of senior management and board members have joined in a management buyout of the Peter Lang Academic Publishing Group from the Peter Lang Children’s Trust. The deal is expected to close by mid-2015. The new management team comprises Claude Béglé as chairman of the board, Kelly Shergill as CEO and deputy chairman, Vanessa Weber as CFO and Abdurahman Kaymaz as head of warehouse and logistics. Stuart Wilkins, who led the process on behalf of the Trust, said in the announcement: “The Trust Board recognized that their […]
Corporate: Coffee House Press Partners With Emily Books; The Readers Guild; and More
The special committee appointed by the Books-A-Million board to examine the Anderson family’s offer to buy out other shareholders and take the company private has hired Houlihan Lokey as its financial adviser. Coffee House Press is partnering with Brooklyn-based feminist publishing project Emily Books, on an imprint for “books that speak to the aesthetic excellence, experimental boldness, and social concerns of both organizations.” Coffee House will publish two Emily Books titles a year, starting with the spring 2016 publication of Jade Sharma’s debut novel, Problems. Businessman Fred Tarter, in publishing since 1962 and the creator of enterprises from Hootenanny Magazine to the Burger King Kids’ […]
Barnes & Noble to Spin Off College Business As Separate, Public Company
Barnes & Noble filed a registration statement with the SEC to separate BN College into a separate, publicly-traded company, which will operate as Barnes & Noble Education Inc. They say “the separation is intended to be a tax-free distribution to Barnes & Noble shareholders and is anticipated to be completed by the end of August 2015.” Investors welcomed the news, with the stock rising 7 percent to roughly $26 a share in early morning trading, the highest it has been since 2009. The company politely admits that combining the once private BN College with the BN retail stores and declining Nook […]
Lerner Publishing Group Acquires Egmont USA List
What seemed like a premature announcement from Egmont that it was closing its US office at the end of January after giving their “attempts to sell” the unit only four months now has further clarity. Lerner Publishing has acquired Egmont USA’s list of nearly 100 titles, and will fold those titles into its existing imprints including Carolrhoda Books, Carolrhoda La, Darby Creek, and Millbrook Press as of April 30. Egmont USA will publish the eight remaining titles on their 2015 winter list which will be distributed by Random House until April 30, at which time Lerner will take over publication […]