Hachette Livre to acquire Numilog

Hachette Livre and Numilog have signed a memorandum of agreement leading to the acquisition of Numilog by Hachette Livre.

The acquisition is an important step in Hachette Livre’s digital strategy. With Numilog, Hachette Livre takes on an infrastructure that will enable it to distribute books published by its own imprints as well as by third-party publishers in a variety of digital formats, with each content provider retaining control of its files.

Numilog’ approach is and will remain multi-publisher, as is Hachette Livre’s book distribution system of long standing.

Denis Zwirn, the founder of Numilog, will remain as CEO of the company

“Numilog’s know-how, as a leader on the French market, will be an important asset for Hachette Livre with respect to key links of the digital value chain: conversion, storage, protection, distribution and billing”, said Arnaud Nourry, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Livre. He added: “We will offer bookstores showing interest an opportunity to set up their own platform”.

“To be part of Hachette Livre opens new opportunities to Numilog”, said Denis Zwirn, CEO of Numilog. “It will help us build an offering of services as rich and diverse as the market will allow, as well as develop internationally”.

Founded in 2000, Numilog is the #1 concentrator of French language books and the main delivery system of multi-format e-books in France. Its expertise is threefold: 1) The digitising and conversion of existing books into all current digital formats. 2) On-line selling of e-books on behalf of bookstores (with order processing, billing and delivery under the bookstore’s label), and of e-books from its own catalog.3) The building of a digital library that offers 43 000 titles to date, made available for on-line consumers and libraries alike.
Denis Zwirn, an e-book pioneer in France, is the author of a survey, assigned by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, on “establishing a business model and defining the participation of publishers to project Europeana, the European Digital Library”.

Hachette Livre is, as Lagardère Publishing, one of the four main business units of Groupe Lagardère. It is the #1 publishing company in France and # 2 worldwide in consumer books. It publishes books under more than a hundred imprints throughout the world in all genres: fiction, non-fiction, school books, illustrated, how-to, travel and leisure, children’s books, part-works… 65% of Hachette Livre’s sales originate outside of France, in the English speaking world (USA, UK, Australia) and the Spanish-speaking world (Spain, Mexico, Argentina).