As part of its purchase of Nielsen BookScan earlier this year, the NPD Group also acquired Pubnet and PubEasy—and now NPD has sold those ordering services to a Germany-based organization.
Effective July 1, MVB Marketing, a subsidiary of Börsenverein, the German Publisher and Bookseller Association, will take over ownership of Pubnet and PubEasy. Also on that date, Ted Hill, an industry veteran and most recently founder of THA Consulting, will begin his new role as general manager of MVB US Inc., MVB’s newest subsidiary. According to MVB, it will maintain the current technology for the ordering systems until the end of 2018, at which point it will be replaced by MVB’s own platform.
MVB is the leading service provider for the German book trade. One of its main products is VLB, the German books-in-print database that has more than two million products from more than 21,000 publishers. Its parent company, Börsenverein, operates the Frankfurt Book Fair.
MVB CEO Ronald Schild said that as global book markets continue to converge, the demand for international service providers is also growing. The acquisition of PubEasy and Pubnet is “the perfect step in terms of our development strategy, with which we want to expand beyond the boundaries of German-speaking countries,” Schild said. “The synergies in the functionality of the three ordering systems provide us with the opportunity to merge the technical infrastructure so as to serve the current and additional markets with a uniform platform strategy.”
Pubnet has about 250 publishers and suppliers, as well as 1,600 retailers, and completed 16.7 million transactions in 2016. PubEasy has 11 American and three Canadian suppliers, plus 4,100 retailers in 100 different countries, and did 10.2 million business transactions in 2016.
“I’m very much looking forward to working with MVB to rebuild and relaunch Pubnet and PubEasy to create a better, more seamless experience for our customers,” Hill said in a statement.
