Imprints Many Founded 1948 | Founder Georg von Holtzbrinck Distribution Worldwide Country of origin Germany | |
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Owners Monika Schoeller, Stefan von Holtzbrinck | ||
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a privately-held Stuttgart-based company which owns publishing companies worldwide. The company has published a wide variety of books, from The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie to classics by Agatha Christie, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway and John Updike. Other well-known publications of the company include the scientific journal Nature and Scientific American. It is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies.
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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 now owns 53% of the combined company.
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.
Subsidiaries and imprints
In Germany:
In the United States:
Using the Macmillan name:
Using the Audio Renaissance name in Southfield, Michigan:
In the United Kingdom:
In India: