Hachette Book Group, Ingram Content Group, and the Perseus Books Group announce major transaction

Hachette to buy Perseus Books, and to sell Perseus’s Distribution Businesses to Ingram.

Hachette Book Group, Ingram Content Group, and the Perseus Books Group announced today that the three companies have entered into binding commitments for Hachette to purchase Perseus and sell Perseus’s client services businesses to Ingram. The deal is expected to close soon after regulatory approval of the Hachette-Perseus transaction is received.

Hachette Book Group will make Perseus Books a major new publishing division of the company, comprising Perseus Books’ nine imprints, including Avalon Books, Basic Books, Da Capo Press, PublicAffairs, and Running Press, as well as Perseus’s partnerships with The Daily Beast, The Economist, The Nation Institute, and The Weinstein Company. Perseus, the industry’s sixth largest general interest trade publisher, brings out approximately 700 new titles per year and has an extensive backlist of more than 6,000 books. Perseus’s strength in a wide range of popular non-fiction categories – including history, science, religion, economics, biography, social criticism, music, popular culture, travel, health, parenting, and self-help – has produced many bestsellers and award winners, including such works as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger and Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin, the Pulitzer Prize winners A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, Banker to the Poor by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus, Mighty Be Our Powers by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Leymah Gbowee, The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Nobel Prize recipient Richard Feynman, and the leading travel guide series by Rick Steves.

Ingram Content Group will acquire Perseus’s client service businesses, which together form a comprehensive print and digital distribution services provider to independent publishers, with more than 400 publisher clients ranging from Grove Atlantic and DreamWorks Press to Harvard Business Review Press and City Lights. Ingram will combine this business and its comprehensive 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 this transaction, Ingram will take on the client publishers of Perseus’s four distinctive publisher services brands: Publishers Group West (PGW), Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Perseus Distribution Services, and Legato Publishers Group, as well as Constellation, Perseus’s digital asset management and distribution service. Ingram is also pleased to welcome the Faber Factory relationship powered by Constellation. Ingram will add Perseus Distribution’s Jackson, Tennessee facility to its growing physical and print-on-demand logistics network.

Michael Pietsch, Hachette Book Group CEO, 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 nonfiction 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.”

John Ingram, Ingram Content Group’s chairman and CEO, added, “Ingram Content Group is pleased to enter into this agreement to purchase the Perseus distribution businesses. 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.”

“I am tremendously proud of my colleagues whose hard work and determination built Perseus into an innovative industry leader,” said David Steinberger, president and CEO of the Perseus Books Group. “As CEO, 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.”

David Steinberger will be leaving the company after the transaction is completed but will consult for HBG for a period.