A day after rumors swirled that Liberty Media had stepped back from buying a 70 percent stake in Barnes & Noble, the bookseller announced Thursday afternoon that Liberty had invested an aggregate of $204 million, through the purchase of newly issued convertible preferred stock, which can be converted into 12 million shares of common stock. The purchase was for the same $17 a share as the original buyout offer – now abandoned – and Liberty will receive a quarterly dividend at an annual rate of 7.75 percent. Under the deal, which closes today, and subject to the waiting period under anti-trust […]
Finance
McGraw-Hill Exploring Separation of Education Business
For years investors have disapproved of McGraw-Hill’s portfolio, which folds the S&P Credit Ratings Agency, Education, and other unrelated businesses under the same umbrella. Recent share pickups by activist hedge fund Jana Partners in tandem with the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund heightened calls for the company to break up, sell, or spin off some of its divisions – especially the education side, the largest group within the company. The WSJ first reported, with other outlets following with their own unnamed sources or “people briefed on the matter” that McGraw-Hill retained investment bank Evercore Partners to advise the company on a […]
Legal News: Another Appeals Case Rules First Sale Doctrine Is US-Only; ‘The Shack’ Lawsuit Finally Settled
Just a few weeks after the Ninth Circuit ruled in a case featuring Costco’s sale of imported Omega watches that the first sale doctrine does not apply to imported goods, another ruling this week from the Second Circuit more forcefully confirms this conclusion – and this time it involves book sales. In a 2-1 decision, the court said Supap Kirtsaeng violated Wiley’s copyrights when he sold cheap foreign editions of the publishers’ textbooks in the US because first sale doctrine does not apply to books sold outside of the country. Any other conclusion would undercut a law already on the books […]
Liberty Media Now Favors Other Options Instead of Outright BN Buy
In the more than three months since Liberty Media stated its intention to buy a 70 percent stake in Barnes & Noble at 17 cents a share, further reports suggested that prospect had dimmed, or at least put on hold. Then on Wednesday morning a report by dealReporter – which has a hit-or-miss track record on such things – intimated that “constraints on financing had quieted deal talk” and that Liberty was leaning towards “a preferred share investment.” Per “two sources familiar with the situation and an industry banker following the situation,” the original deal wasn’t off the table, but […]
RR Donnelley To Acquire LibreDigital
RR Donnelley announced today that it has acquired digital content distribution and e-service provider LibreDigital for an undisclosed sum. President and ceo Thomas Quinlan said in a statement that buying LibreDigital will “extend RR Donnelley’s reach across the breadth of the supply chain.” This is the second company Donnelley has purchased this week, having also bought Sequence Personal, a provider of proprietary software that enables readers to select relevant content to be digitally produced as specialized publications. Earlier this summer Donnelley also acquired online writer services company Helium and Journalism Online. “With this acquisition we uniquely position RR Donnelley to […]
Quarto Buys Frances Lincoln For £4.5m, Reports Sales and Profit Increase So Far This Year
Quarto announced Tuesday that it had acquired Frances Lincoln Ltd for £4.5m. Quarto chairman Laurence Orbach said in a statement that Frances Lincoln’s non-fiction and illustrated children’s book list “complements Quarto’s existing UK publishing business, several imprints trading under the Aurum name, and more than doubles the scale of our presence in the UK. The acquisition is in keeping with our strategy to further expand our already broad offering of niche content.” For the fiscal year ending March 31, Frances Lincoln reported an audited profit before tax of £619,000, net assets of £3.8 million and gross assets of £5.9 million. […]