MHE Cuts 215
McGraw-Hill Education eliminated 215 positions in the fourth quarter as part of a companywide downsizing program that cut a total of 375 jobs throughout parent company McGraw-Hill Cos. MHC took a restructuring charge of $26.3 million to account for the downsizing, including $11.4 million associated with the cuts in the education group. For the full year, MHE lost 455 jobs, for which MHC took a charge of $25.3 million. MHE is home to the school group as well as the higher education, professional and international operations.
Author Solutions Buys Xlibris
Author Solutions, the largest self-publisher in the country, has acquired Xlibris, one of the first companies to use digital technology to let writers publish their own titles. The addition of Xlibris's 20,000 titles brings the Author Solutions catalogue to almost 100,000 titles from 70,000 authors. The Xlibris purchase is Author Solutions' second acquisition of a major competitor within the last 18 months. In September 2007, the company, now backed by the private equity firm Bertram Capital, acquired iUniverse.
Quick Buys V&B
Quick Publishing of St. Louis has acquired VanderWyk & Burnham, an independent publisher located in Acton, Mass. The purchase involves 25 titles. The V&B imprint will join Quick's four other imprints: Senior Sense, Quick Prints, Cache River Press and Cache River Science, which specializes in titles on microbiology, pathology and reproduction.
Kaplan Buys Cleveland Clinic Titles
Kaplan Publishing has acquired most of the assets of the Cleveland Clinic Press, which was founded in 2005 as the publishing arm of the medical center. The purchase involved 36 titles, including 29 titles in the Cleveland Clinic Guides line. Approximately half of the guides have been previously published, and Kaplan will repackage and revise those, while publishing the balance as new titles.
Nicholas Brealey Buys Davies-Black
U.K.-based Nicholas Brealey has acquired Davies-Black, the book publishing division of CPP, in Mountain View, Calif. The purchase will add more than 100 business books to NB North America's backlist of 165 titles. Davies-Black will become an imprint of Brealey, whose North American offices are in Boston. Currently the company has two imprints: Intercultural Press, which specializes in cross-cultural titles for the academic and professional markets, and Nicholas Brealey Publishing, which focuses on coaching, business, travel and self-help.
Free BEA Passes
The ABA and BEA are introducing incentives to increase bookseller attendance at this year's convention in New York. Each ABA bookstore attending the ABA's Winter Institute in January will receive one additional free pass to BEA. The ABA has also joined forces with BEA to provide—for the first time— free passes to all ABA member stores, based on each store's ABA membership level. Changes are also being made to the education panels.
