The powerhouse publisher was put up for sale by its owner, ViacomCBS, in March, and the company has since fielded more than half a dozen inquiries, according to three people familiar with the process who declined to be named because the matter remains confidential.
In addition to News Corp, which already owns HarperCollins, the other leading bidder is Penguin Random House, according to the people. Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by German media giant Bertelsmann.
At least one of the offers has topped $1.7 billion, far above the minimum ViacomCBS had set, according to two of the people. Several financial firms, after lobbing offers below that range, are no longer in the running. Final bids are due before Thanksgiving, and ViacomCBS could announce a winner some time after that. A deal may not materialize.
Simon & Schuster, one of the five largest book publishers in the country, is considered a prize in the industry. Its deep bench of name-brand writers, from children’s author Judy Blume to novelist Annie Proulx to journalist and historian Walter Isaacson, makes it a desirable acquisition. It also has several perennial best-sellers, including Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind” and Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
Publishing has become a winner-takes-all business, a circumstance brought on by Amazon’s aggressive pricing, and now a publisher needs size to survive. Tent-pole titles can better offset losses from weaker books. A bigger inventory can generate more data on customer habits, on surging topics and on sales.
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