Holtzbrinck Publishing Group

Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (German: Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck) is a privately-held German company based in Stuttgart which owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies.

Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Parent companyVerlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH
StatusPrivate
Founded1948 (1948)
FounderGeorg von Holtzbrinck
Country of originGermany
Headquarters locationStuttgart
DistributionWorldwide
Publication typesBooks, Newspapers, Academic journals, Magazines
ImprintsSee below
Owner(s)
  • Monika Schoeller
  • Stefan von Holtzbrinck
[1]
Official websiteHoltzbrinck.com

In 2015, it merged most of its Macmillan Science and Education unit (including Nature Publishing Group) with Springer Science+Business Media, creating the company Springer Nature. Holtzbrinck owns 53% of the combined company.[2][3]

History

Established by Georg von Holtzbrinck in 1948, the group first began as a German book club. In the 1960s, it purchased Droemer, Kindler, Rowohlt and S. Fischer Verlag, two German publishing companies. In 1985, it acquired the retail book division of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, naming it the Henry Holt Book Company. One year later, the company acquired Scientific American magazine for $52.6 million. In 1994, it purchased a majority interest in Farrar, Straus & Giroux from retiring Roger W. Straus, Jr. A year later, it purchased a 70% majority interest in The Macmillan Group, and then the remaining shares in 1999.

In March 2006, Holtzbrinck forced Tor Books, which is owned by Holtzbrinck, to stop making its books available as e-books via Baen Ebooks because of concerns regarding the lack of digital rights management (DRM). The policy was later changed and Tor titles became available as DRM-free e-books in 2012. The Tor UK label in Britain (and hence the EU) does the same. The company also received a good deal of attention when it bought the then leading German social networking platform StudiVZ in January 2007.

Holtzbrinck has total annual sales of 2.1 billion euros (as of 2005); 49% of sales are in Germany and 23% in North America. It had 2005 earnings before taxes of 142 million euros, and a total of 14,000 employees.

Chairman of the group is Stefan von Holtzbrinck. John Sargent is CEO of Macmillan, the company that unites the US-based businesses of the group.[4]

Subsidiaries and imprints
German newspaper Die Zeit in newsstand

In Germany:

In the United States:
Using the Macmillan name:

Using the Audio Renaissance name in Southfield, Michigan:

  • Renaissance Media[7]

In the United Kingdom:

See also

Notes and references
  1. Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. "Management". Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
  2. Bray, Chad (15 January 2015). "Publisher of Nature and Scientific American to Form Joint Venture". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  3. Carpenter, Caroline (6 May 2015). "Completed merger forms 'Springer Nature'". The Bookseller. Retrieved 14 January 2016.
  4. Book View Archived 20 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine, Publishing Trends, April 2006
  5. https://www.fischerverlage.de/verlage/fischer_krueger, 24 April 2020
  6. https://www.fischerverlage.de/verlage/fischer_scherz, 24 April 2020
  7. Maughan, Shannon (1 October 2001). "Holtzbrinck Acquires Renaissance Media". Publishers Weekly. United States: PWxyz LLC. Retrieved 8 March 2017.
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