Swedish audiobook subscription service Storytel published its 2020 annual report, with total sales of SEK 2.39 billion ($268 million), up from SEK 1.84 billion, exceeding its goal for the year despite a strong Swedish krona. The company’s pretax loss was SEK (210) million, an improvement from SEK (380) million last year, though the company remains…
International News
Tencent’s Ebook Outlet Launches North American Platform
China Literature, the ebook venture of the Chinese chat and gaming giant Tencent, has launched a North American platform, featuring more than 200,000 original English-language titles as well as 1,000 works translated from Chinese. (All My Beasts Are Legendary and Rebirth: Pampered Wife’s Counterattack are the two titles currently featured on the front page’s top…
Lagardere Signals Openness to a “Change in Sponsorship”
While announcing Lagardere’s annual results last week, ceo Arnaud Lagardere dangled the possibility of a change to the corporate structure of his company, which is currently controlled by Lagardere’s private holding company. During the Q&A for analysts, Lagardere explained that no decision had been made regarding a sale or change of sponsorship: “I’m the one…
Bonnier Books UK Sues Former Accounting Firm for £90 Million
Bonnier Books UK has finally gotten to the bottom of their disastrous years of believing that overspending to buy growth would work — which ended in big layoffs, the abrupt dismissal of the executive that led the spree, and recapitalization from the parent company of £51 million. It now turns out the whole thing was…
Vivendi Becomes Second Largest Shareholder in Amber-Backed Prisa
Vivendi has built a 9.9 percent stake in education and media publisher Grupo Prisa, which owns El Pais newspaper as well as Santillana, a major educational publisher, particularly in South America. Prisa sold the Santillana trade business to Penguin Random House in 2014 and though lightly reported, last October they agreed to sell Santillana’s K-12…
Briefs
Riky Stock will join North South Books as managing director on January 1. She will focus on “strengthening transatlantic ties to the company’s head office in Zurich, Switzerland and developing a more international approach to marketing and communications.” Stock was head of the German Book Office in New York and represented the Frankfurt Book Fair…