Bloomsbury has made another addition to its growing academic division with the purchase of Oxford International Publishers Limited, which operates as Berg Publishers, for 1.8 million pounds in cash, 200,000 million pounds in stock, and up to 1 million pounds in deferred compensation based performance. Focused on books and journals for the academic student market in the fields of fashion, design and culture studies, Berg had sales 1.58 million pounds in 2007. Kathryn Earle will continue to run the company.Release
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Credit Crunch Ends Informa Buyout Bid
After Informa rejected a reduced bid of 1.9 billion pounds (down from an original bid of 2.2 billion pounds), the consortium of private equity groups hoping to buy out the company “has decided to withdraw its proposal.” The group, led by Providence Equity Partners, reportedly had trouble raising financing for the deal. But the group “said they reserved the right to make or participate in an offer for Informa within six months subject to certain conditions.” In today’s markets, Informa shares are trading over 20 percent below that reduced offer (the group bid 450p a share; the price is now […]
Plus: Waiting for Brisingr; Prosecuting Bush in Vermont; No Bratz for Scholastic
* Booksellers and fans are gearing up for the just-past-midnight launch of Christopher Paolini’s BRISINGR. In the UK, Waterstone’s children’s buyer Claudia Mody tells the Telegraph, “It’s our biggest pre-order campaign for anything since the final Harry Potter novel. Bigger than Sebastian Faulk’s James Bond novel, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight or Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking. It’s going to be huge.” * The WSJ dubs books like Reading the OED and works of AJ Jacobs as “grit lit,” calling them “the geek equivalent of extreme sports.” Joanne Kaufman adds: “The popularity of such books makes perfect sense. After all, […]
Juicy Bits Returns: Angler
Slate brings back their juicy bits column, pulling “a breezy executive summary” from Barton Gellman’s ANGLER “for those of you who are too lazy or too incurious to read [the] lengthy expose.”Slate
Book Spun from Movie Could Be Season's Christian Hit
Here’s a twist on the usual formula. “Fireproof” is a movie set for release at the end of the month about a firefighter asked by his father to take a 40-day marriage challenge before divorcing his wife of seven years. The challenge involves reading and following an invented book THE LOVE DARE, “which eventually transforms him and his view of love, marriage, and faith.” So test audiences for the movie asked how they could get the book–which didn’t exist. Brothers Alex Kendrick and Stephen Kendrick, pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia and creators of Sherwood Pictures, who directed […]
Do You XML?
O’Reilly and the Ideal Logical Company have partnered in a new information enterprise that will include conferences, a survey, and research papers “to understand and spread the knowledge publishers need to move forward with XML.” They note: “The StartwithXML project will explore all the issues of moving to a StartwithXML workflow through interviews and case studies with publishers and with the channel partners they will be working with to reach new readers in new ways. We’ll be looking at what benefits can come to a publisher today from working this way, and what important steps to the future are enabled […]