It’s Official: Riverdeep Buys Harcourt Education US As previewed yesterday, then confirmed on our site and now everywhere, Reed confirmed the sale of Harcourt’s US Schools Education business to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group for $4 billion ($3.7 billion in cash and $300 million in stock, which will leave Reed with an 11.8 percent stake in the parent company). Per our speculation, the Harcourt list will apparently be incorporated into Houghton Mifflin to “create a preeminent publisher with one of the industry’s most distinguished lists of authors.” Houghton ceo (and yes, former head of Harcourt Education) Tony Lucki will lead the […]

Riverdeep Tipped as Imminent Harcourt Buyer Barry O’Callaghan, the Irish businessman with the magical touch for raising capital to fuel mammoth educational purchases (at mammoth prices) is reported by the FT as being “close to acquiring the remaining units of Harcourt Education, the US publishing division of Reed Elsevier, in a deal which could be valued at around $4 billion. People familiar with the situation said the deal could be announced on Monday.” The trade divisions would stand as a sideshow to the expected combination of Houghton and Harcourt’s educational lines. But given that many observers expected most potential Harcourt […]

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 Tara Yellen’s AFTER HOURS AT THE ALMOST HOME, about one night, […]

Potter: Poll, Pre-Orders, and Press Poor reporters across the land are being charged by their editors to keep the Potter copy flowing. We’re going to avoid most of it, but here are a few of the more newsworthy tidbits: — Zogby conducted a poll of almost 6,000 adults and found that 30 percent have read at least one of the Potter books (38 percent of women, and 22 percent of men, to be more precise). Not suprisingly, the 18 to 24 demographic accounts for much of that adult readership, though; 48 percent of those respondents have read at least one […]

Obama’s Book Club Strategy Barack Obama is taking the book-as-campaign-tool strategy a step further than his peers, launching a series of book clubs in New Hampshire towns and online, focused on his DREAMS OF MY FATHER. Among the features, the Chicago Tribune notes, is that “book club participants will be able to dial into conference calls throughout the summer with significant figures from his life.” (About 85 people participated in the first round.) The paper adds, “the Obama effort is one of the campaign’s more creative ways to push his biography, something his operatives feel is one of his biggest […]

Price Problems Remain Right after Lunch Deluxe went out yesterday we noticed an interesting price comparison between Knopf’s US hardcover edition of Bill Clinton’s forthcoming GIVING at $24.95, and Random UK’s hardcover at basically twice the price, at 25 pounds. Right there in a nutshell you have on display many of the problems of the UK market — with hardcover prices vastly inflated to paper over the huge discounts given to the supermarkets while still preserving profit margins, but leaving regular bookstores (and regular bookstore customers) hammered, and creating a natural opportunity for importing US editions from mainland Europe that […]