Blackwell Publishing sells to John Wiley & Son
The announcement that Blackwell Publishing is to be acquired for £572m by John Wiley & Son must make November 2006 one of the most amazing months ever in the educational publishing industry.
We thought local firm Informa a more likely buyer than the New Jersey-based JWS. It was only four years ago that Toby Blackwell tried to sell his family company to Taylor & Francis for £300m; the same Taylor & Francis that is now a key part of Informa’s educational publishing empire. With this deal JWS now becomes the number two STM publisher behind Reed Elsevier.
Blackwell, Wolters Kluwer, Houghton Mifflin and Thomson are some of the biggest names in educational publishing. Where will they be in five years’ time and what will happen to the private equity firms who have backed their buyers? When this merger mania ends, will these companies still be great publishing companies or hollowed out corporate shells with a mountain of debt (and fewer employees)? Will companies like Reed, Pearson, Informa and JWS dominate educational publishing or, while the bean counters try to tame these financial behemoths, will small innovative publishers come along and outperform them to become the educational publishing giants of the twenty first century?
Size and scale are certainly advantageous, but successful publishing will always need creativity and risk, characteristics unlikely to survive in business cultures driven primarily by complicated financial models.