Thomson Sale Blows Past Estimates Thomson Learning, comprising higher-education, careers and library reference assets, is being sold to Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners (which oversees the Ontario municipal employees’ pension plan) for $7.75 billion — well above the roughly $5 billion bids that analysts were expecting. The CBC says that “as part of the transaction, OMERS will get majority ownership of Nelson Canada.” Perseus Ax Falls Quickly on Avalon Perseus Books Group CEO David Steinberger announced the next reorganization wave at the company in an internal letter yesterday. The Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth imprints will be eliminated, […]

Whose Your DAD? At today’s Book Industry Study Group (BISG) Making Information Pay Conference, consultant Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company officially previewed his lexicon of new acronyms to describe the growing herd of intermediaries who want to manage digital content for publishers (including large publishers themselves). In Shatzkin’s vision, just as nearly every publisher works with a physical distributor to bring their work to retail (and collect payment), the growing world of promotional and paid electronic content will require nearly everyone to have a companion digital distributor. Hence DADs — digital asset distributors. As part of a research […]

Quarterly Report Cards: Harper Shows Improvement HarperCollins ended their streak of four straight quarterly profit declines in the fiscal third quarter, with operating income up $3 million to $29 million, on sales of $291 million, up six percent from a year ago. CEO Jane Friedman already foresees a strong finish to her fiscal year: “All my life I have wanted Christmas in the spring; at this moment, HarperCollins is having a second Christmas.” She cites the UK import THE DANGEROUS BOOK FOR BOYS, which went out with 100,000 copies last week in the US and has already seen three reprints […]

Personnel News Endeavor’s new book division based in New York has added Rebecca Oliver as a literary agent, starting later this month. She’ll oversee foreign and domestic subsidiary rights and work alongside Richard Abate. Oliver has been at Grand Central/Warner since 1999, most recently as associate director of subsidiary rights. At Ecco, Emily Takoudes is being promoted to senior editor. In the S&S publicity department, Kelly Welsh has been promoted to senior publicist. Bookseller Announcements from Borders, Amazon, and BN Borders is starting to line up vendors for their new bookselling site, once they depart from Amazon in 2008. Sterling […]

Pearson Peels Off Harcourt UK Pearson announced Friday that they have agreed to purchase Harcourt Assessment (the American educational testing company) and Harcourt Education International, based in Oxford, England, subject to approval from regulators, for $950 million. These two units generated $524 million in sales and $31 million in operating profit in 2006. Harcourt parent Reed says the sale of the US schools unit of Harcourt Education (and other components, including the trade division) “is proceeding satisfactorily and the disposal is expected to complete in the second half of 2007.” The remaining businesses up for sale comprised $1.113 billion in […]

Deal Reports Just e-mail to deals@PublishersMarketplace if you aren’t using the online form linked below. Report a deal using the online form The Key As usual, the handy key to our Lunch deal categories. While all reports are always welcome, those that include a category will generally receive a higher listing when it comes time to put them all together. “nice deal” $1 – $49,000 “very nice deal” $50,000 – $99,000 “good deal” $100,000 – $250,000 “significant deal” $251,000 – $499,000 “major deal” $500,000 and up FICTION Debut Karen Weinreb’s THE SUMMER KITCHEN, pitched as a cross between CHOCOLAT and […]