History
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 German book club. In the 1960s, it purchased the German publishing companies Droemer, Kindler, Rowohlt and S. Fischer Verlag. 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 Macmillan Publishers, and then the remaining shares in 1999. In 2001, Pearson sold the Macmillan trademark in the United States (gained with the acquisition of Simon & Schuster educational and professional division, which included the assets of former Macmillan Inc.) to Holtzbrinck. [7]
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.
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 include John Sargent. [8]
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Tor Books is the primary imprint of Tor Publishing Group, a publishing company based in New York City. It primarily publishes science fiction and fantasy titles, and is the largest publisher of Chinese science fiction novels in North America.
Macmillan Publishers is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the firm would soon establish itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian era children's literature, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).
Dieter von Holtzbrinck is one of the heirs to the Holtzbrinck publishing empire, founded by his father Georg von Holtzbrinck (1909–1983) in 1948. In 2006, his wealth was estimated at around US$1 billion.
Springer Science+Business Media, commonly known as Springer, is a German multinational publishing company of books, e-books and peer-reviewed journals in science, humanities, technical and medical (STM) publishing.
Ilse Aichinger was an Austrian writer known for her accounts of her persecution by the Nazis because of her Jewish ancestry. She wrote poems, short stories and radio plays, and won multiple European literary prizes.
St. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in Manhattan in New York City. It is headquartered in the Equitable Building. St. Martin's Press is considered one of the largest English-language publishers, bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under six imprints.
Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. Both companies are owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Holt McDougal is an American publishing company, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, that specializes in textbooks for use in high schools.
S. Fischer Verlag is a major German publishing house, which has operated as a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Group since 1962. The publishing house was founded in 1881 by Samuel Fischer in Berlin, but is currently based in Frankfurt am Main, and is traditionally counted among the most prestigious publishing houses in the German-speaking world.
Rowohlt Verlag is a German publishing house based in Hamburg, with offices in Reinbek and Berlin. It has been part of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Group since 1982. The company was created in 1908 in Leipzig by Ernst Rowohlt.
Bookish.com is a content discovery and ecommerce website, which launched in February 2013, devoted to books. The site allows users to browse an extensive database of books and authors, add books to user-created digital "shelves", get custom book recommendations, read editorial content and purchase physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks.
Henry Holt and Company is an American book-publishing company based in New York City. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt. The company publishes in the fields of American and international fiction, biography, history, politics, science, psychology, health, and children's literature. In the U.S., it operates under Macmillan Publishers.
Droemer Knaur is a publishing group based in Munich. The group consists of the book publishers Droemer, Knaur, the Pattloch Publisher and O.W. Barth. Droemer Knaur belongs to the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Prestel Publishing is an art book publisher, with books on art, architecture, photography, design, fashion, craft, culture, history and ethnography. Lists range from museum guides, to encyclopaedias, art and architecture monographs to facsimile volumes and books for children.
George von Holtzbrinck was a German publisher and founder of Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Urban & Schwarzenberg was a German academic publishing company, specializing in medical literature. It was founded as a book store in 1866 in Vienna. It acquired the Wiener Medizinische Presse in 1876, marking the start of Urban & Schwarzenberg as a medical publisher. In 1898, the company opened an office in Berlin, which soon after became its new head office. The company relocated to Munich in 1949.
Springer Nature or the Springer Nature Group is a German-British academic publishing company created by the May 2015 merger of Springer Science+Business Media and Holtzbrinck Publishing Group's Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan, and Macmillan Education.
Böhlau Verlag is a book and magazine publisher predominantly of humanities and social science disciplines, based in Vienna and Cologne, with a branch in Weimar. They describe their focus as being "from the historically oriented humanities". The publishing house was an independent and privately owned media corporation until it was acquired by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in 2017.
The Nicolai Verlag is one of the oldest surviving book publishers in Germany. It was founded in Berlin in 1713 by Christoph Gottlieb Nicolai as the Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung. Until the end of the 19th century, it was based in the Nicolaihaus building at 13 Brüderstraße. Initially, texts were published about religion, medicine, and jurisprudence, but also school books.
