Bloomberg Press has signed a deal with the U.K. house Profile Books to publish and distribute books from the Economist, with which Profile has a publishing arrangement.
Bloomberg has licensed four Economist titles from Profile, including a new edition of a business dictionary and a guide to financial markets, and will republish them in the U.S. next spring. Next summer, Bloomberg will also distribute about a dozen frontlist Economist tiles stateside. Norton, Bloomberg's distributor, will handle sales and fulfillment, while Bloomberg will oversee marketing of these titles. Bloomberg will soon distribute a number of backlist books, too. After the summer, said Bloomberg Press spokesperson John Crutcher, the publisher will continue to publish and distribute some Economist titles, though it is not sure yet how many.
The Economist publishes business reference titles, for which it relies partly on the magazine staff and partly on outside writers. It has not had a major house releasing its titles en masse in the U.S. for some time. A small Canadian distributor called Renouf had made some of the magazine's books available over the last few years, and in the late 1990s, a number of Economist titles were published in the U.S. by Wiley.
