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| Parent company | Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH |
|---|---|
| Status | Private |
| Founded | 1948; 78 years ago (1948) |
| Founder | Georg von Holtzbrinck |
| Country of origin | Germany |
| Headquarters location | Stuttgart, Germany |
| Distribution | Worldwide |
| Publication types | Books,Newspapers,Academic journals,Magazines |
| Imprints | See below |
| Owner |
|
| Official website | holtzbrinck.com |
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (German:Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck) is a German publishing company headquartered inStuttgart, thatownspublishing companies worldwide. ThroughMacmillan Publishers, it owns one of theBig Five English-languagepublishing companies.
In 2015, itmerged most of its Macmillan Science and Education unit (includingNature Publishing Group) withSpringer Science+Business Media, creating the companySpringer Nature. Holtzbrinck owns 53% of the combined company.[2][3]
The history of Georg von Holtzbrink's publishing activities during the Nazi years 1933-1945 has been controversial.[4][5] After World War II,Georg von Holtzbrinck, a former member of the Nazi party,[6] reestablished a group in 1948, beginning as a Germanbook club. In the 1960s, it purchased the German publishing companiesDroemer, Kindler,Rowohlt andS. Fischer Verlag. In 1985, it acquired the retail book division ofHolt, Rinehart and Winston, naming it theHenry Holt Book Company. One year later, the company acquiredScientific Americanmagazine for $52.6 million. In 1994, it purchased amajority interest inFarrar, Straus & Giroux from retiringRoger W. Straus, Jr. A year later, it purchased a 70% majority interest inMacmillan Publishers, and then the remaining shares in 1999. In 2001,Pearson sold the Macmillan trademark in the United States (gained with the acquisition ofSimon & Schuster educational and professional division, which included the assets of formerMacmillan Inc.) to Holtzbrinck.[7]
In March 2006, Holtzbrinck forcedTor Books, which is owned by Holtzbrinck, to stop making its books available ase-books viaBaen Ebooks because of concerns regarding the lack ofdigital 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 platformStudiVZ 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.
The current chairman of the group is Stefan von Holtzbrinck. Don Weisberg is CEO of Macmillan, the company that unites the US-based businesses of the group. Previous CEOs of Macmillan includeJohn Sargent.[8]
In Germany:
In the United States:
Using theMacmillan name:
Former in the United States:
In the United Kingdom:
The founder of the firm, Georg von Holtzbrinck, was until the early 1930s an impoverished student who sold books door to door. He joined a Nazi student group in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, and stayed loyal to it until the end of the war.
Denn Georg von Holtzbrinck sei „ein wichtiger Akteur" in der Buchhandels- und Verlagsgeschichte im Dritten Reich gewesen. Er war Mitglied der NSDAP, aber nicht als fanatischer Nazi in Erscheinung getreten.
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| Macmillan |
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