Houghton-Harcourt Deal Seen as Yielding Big 3 of Textbooks
Houghton Mifflin Co. announced July 16 that it plans to buy Harcourt Education from Reed Elsevier Group PLC for $4 billion, a move that would narrow the field of large K-12 textbook publishers to three.
The acquisition would leave the 175-year-old Boston-based Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Education, and the McGraw-Hill companies as the dominant suppliers of schoolbooks to the nation’s elementary and secondary schools. Pearson Education is based in Upper Saddle River, N.J., and McGraw-Hill’s headquarters is in New York City.
“The textbook-publishing industry has seen a great deal of mergers and acquisitions over the past eight to 10 years,” said Jay Diskey, the executive director of the Washington-based school division of the Association of American Publishers. “This latest one, if it goes through, will in essence leave three very large companies doing 80 [percent] to 85 percent of...
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