The pair of books that Penguin Random House recently bought by Barack and Michelle Obama, for a reported $65 million, will be released globally by the publisher.
When PRH announced the acquisition, it kept certain standard details--from the publication dates of the titles to their content--mum. This led to speculation on a number of fronts, including whether the publisher might try to sell foreign rights to the books, which it bought world rights to, or publish them on its own around the world. Now, with the London Book Fair just underway, the publisher has announced that it will be releasing the titles through its affiliates around the globe.
A statement issued by the publisher said that the books will be released in all the territories where PRH has a presence. In English, they will be published in the U.S. and Canada by Crown. Viking UK will then handle the English language edition in the United Kingdom, Australia, India, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa. PRH will also be releasing the titles in Spanish in a number of countries through Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, while in the U.S. a Spanish-language edition will released ed by Penguin Random House. In GermanyVerlagsgruppe Random House will publishing the books.
PRH said that, in each territory, "the books will have their own globally coordinated publication plan and publication date."
The publisher's decision to release the titles through its own divisions around the world ends speculation about the house's global publishing strategy. It also ends a guessing game about how much the publisher might have been able to recoup on the expensive books through foreign rights deals. (The advance PRH supposedly paid for the books is the highest, in recent memory, for two standalone titles.)
