Hachette buys Perseus Books

Hachette Book Group (HBG) has purchased independent publisher Perseus Books Group in a three-way deal with Ingram Content Group, which will buy Perseus’ client services businesses from HBG.

The deal, which is still subject to regulatory approval, will see Perseus Books, become “a major new publishing division” of HBG, comprising of Perseus’ nine imprints and its partnerships with the Daily Beast, the Economist, the Nation Institute and the Weinstein Company.

Ingram Content Group will acquire Perseus’s client service businesses, which provide sales, marketing, and distribution to hundreds of independent publishers, and take over Constellation, Perseus’ digital management and distribution service, which has a deal with Faber Factory.

David Steinberger, president and c.e.o. of the Perseus Books Group, which has a London office, will leave the company after the transaction is completed but will consult for HBG for a period.

He said: “I am tremendously proud of my colleagues whose hard work and determination built Perseus into an innovative industry leader.

“As c.e.o., one of my most critical responsibilities is to forge the right future for our people, our authors, our books and our client publishers. We greatly admire Hachette and Ingram as two companies with deep and long-standing commitments to the world of publishing and the written word.”

Perseus, the sixth largest general interest trade publisher in the US, releases around 700 new titles a year, and has a backlist of more than 6,000 books.

HBG c.e.o. Michael Pietsch said: “We’re proud and happy to welcome Perseus staff and authors to Hachette Book Group.

“This exciting acquisition adds a new program of extraordinary diversity, vibrancy, and strength to HBG’s portfolio of publishers. It fits our strategic goals of growth and non-fiction expansion.

“At the same time it significantly increases HBG’s backlist, and will expand our offerings for special markets, gift accounts, and academic markets.

“It also expands HBG’s geographical diversity, adding new presences in Berkeley, Boulder, and Philadelphia to our existing New York, Boston, Nashville, Toronto, and Lebanon Indiana locations.

“We look forward to working with Perseus’s divisions on ways to expand still further their excellent publishing programs, and to bringing HBG’s state-of-the-art publishing systems to work on their books and publishing.”

Ingram will combine Perseus’ business and its services for independent publishers with Ingram Publisher Services’ “wide range of physical, digital and print-on-demand solutions to create a premier global services offering for publishers”.

As part of the deal, Ingram will take on the client publishers of Perseus’s four publisher services brands: Publishers Group West (PGW), Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Perseus Distribution Services, and Legato Publishers Group.

Ingram will add Perseus Distribution’s Jackson, Tennessee facility to its physical and print-on-demand logistics network.

John Ingram, Ingram Content Group’s chairman and c.e.o., said: “We’re betting on the future of the book business, and this deal is proof of Ingram’s commitment to the book industry. We are expanding our growing sales and services platform with this acquisition.

We admire and respect what PGW, Consortium, Perseus Distribution, Legato and Constellation have accomplished in the industry and look forward to collaborating to bring even greater solutions for content distribution to all of our clients.”