Barnes & Noble filed their annual report with the SEC last Friday, which is full of modest facts of note, highlighted below. Separately, the company also executed a new multi-year contract with BN College ceo Max Roberts, providing a base salary of $850,000, plus a target annual bonus of no less than 1.5 times that salary (and guaranteeing generous “change in control” payments). Not announced officially, Barnes & Noble stores veteran, vp of marketing Patricia Bostelman has left the company. eBook Stimulus Act Perhaps the most newsworthy revelation in the BN’s annual report is the first indication of the impact […]
Finance
The New Old Big Five
With a few more hours to think it through, it’s fairly tricky coming up with a precise ranking of the largest trade publishers if we limit the companies to a comparable set of North American-only revenues. (Case in point, yesterday at different points in time the NYT called Perseus the sixth- and eighth-largest trade publisher — we’re not sure either is correct if you look at the “publisher” part of the company rather than the distributor part.) To the extent that the biggest companies report their sales, they generally do not break out their revenues by territory. So we’ve done some further […]
Barnes & Noble To Spin Off Nook As Public Company; Reports Weak Finish to Fiscal 2014
Barnes & Noble announced before the opening of the stock market Wednesday that it intends to split off its Nook Media division from the retail side, creating two separate, publicly traded companies. Shares rose over 10 percent in early morning trading on the news, up to roughly $22.5 a share. The seeds for such a spin-off were laid in the initial creation of Nook Media LLC (which includes details on how BN stores would display and sell Nook devices follow a possible separation). BN hopes to take the steps necessary to complete the separation by the end of March 2015, […]
Perseus, Hachette, Ingram Deal Made “Official”
By the end of the work day Tuesday, the parties confirmed with a press release the deal to sell Perseus Books Group to Hachette Book Group, with HBG having “binding commitments” to purchase all of PBG and in turn sell the sizable distribution lines to Ingram Content Group. Hachette will gain approximately 6,000 titles from the Perseus imprints, and will “make Perseus…a major new publishing division of the company.” The official release is relatively scant on details, and the purchase price was not disclosed. Apparently that information will not be shared any time soon, though presumably the transaction is material […]
Perseus Imprints to be Sold to Hachette Book Group; Distribution Units to Ingram Content
The owners of the Perseus Books Group have agreed to a sale of the company, in an unusual three-way transaction, with a formal announcement expected later today following final execution of the documents. Our understanding of the deal based on people familiar with the negotiations is that Hachette Book Group is purchasing PBG, and then in turn will sell to Ingram Content Group Perseus’s extensive distribution companies — including Perseus Distribution, PGW, the recently-formed Legato, and Consortium, plus the Constellation digital distribution platform and their share in the UK joint-venture Faber Factory Powered by Constellation. What HBG retains is Perseus’s […]
German Trade Association Asks for Investigation Into Amazon
In Europe, the Germany Publishers and Booksellers Association (the Borsenverein) announced today that it filed a 22-page complaint last week against Amazon with the Federal Cartel Office, asking for an investigation into the etailers’ negotiations with book publishers and accusing the company of violating antitrust laws. They are protesting Amazon’s intentional “business interruption” with the books published by Bonnier in Germany, similar to what Hachette has been experiencing in the US. To be clear, the association is relying on media reports indicating Amazon is looking to increase their share of ebook proceeds to 40 percent or 50 percent. Borsenverien chief executive […]