[ad_1]
“Global demand for books – print and digital – has never been higher than it is now,” said Brian Murray, president and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, in a statement. “We anticipate faster growth in companies combined with a time of rapid growth in book consumption.”
Educational publishers haven’t fared so well, as school closures in the United States cut off a critical revenue stream. Revenues for educational publishers fell 10.9% in 2020, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Houghton Mifflin, the largest learning technology company in the K-12 market, saw sales plummet last year due to a sharp decline in its education division, although sales of its mainstream publishing activity were strong.
“Last year, and to this day, the pandemic really disrupted K-12 education,” Houghton Mifflin President and CEO Jack Lynch said in an interview. “It was a binding mechanism for the rapid adoption of the technology.”
The company put its commercial publishing division up for sale last fall as it aims to focus on its core educational publishing and technology business and pay down debt. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.
Erik Gordon, a professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, said the deal could potentially strengthen the two companies. By selling its specialty publishers, Houghton Mifflin can strengthen its position in education, while HarperCollins will earn some 7,000 titles, including Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which Amazon is adapting into a television series.
But Gordon warned that unlike mergers and acquisitions in other industries, growing consolidation in publishing could have an unforeseen cultural ripple effect.
“It’s not that I’ll pay a dollar more for a book, it’s that control of the arena of ideas is limited,” he said. “If the variety of ideas – if the venues for people who want to challenge mainstream ideas – shrink, then on top of something costing me a dollar more, we’re talking about something completely different.”
[ad_2]
Source link