overview

holdings

landmarks

     overview

Reed-Elsevier is a transnational publisher with extensive interests in online information services, consumer magazines, business and scientific journals, consumer and specialist book publishing.

Completion of the (2001) takeover of US publishing group Harcourt General (HG) was expected to give Elsevier around 20% of the global scientific journals market (est. US$10 billion), with margins of up to 35%. In July 2007 Houghton Mifflin announced that it would acquire Harcourt (inc Harcourt Education, Harcourt Trade and Greenwood-Heinemann) from Elsevier for US$3.7 billion in cash and US$300 million in stock. Earlier in the year Elsevier had sold Harcourt Assessment (exam company) and Harcourt Education International to Pearson for US$950 million.

Prominent competitors are Kluwer, Thomson, Pearson and Wiley.

     Reed and Elsevier

Reed International began as a UK newsprint manufacturer. It subsequently acquired major newspaper, magazine and book interests. The International Publishing Corporation (IPC) was bought in 1970; it included Mirror Group newspapers (sold to Robert Maxwell in 1984) and other publishing/printing interests, including Odhams, Newnes, Iliffe & Son, and Butterworths. 

Elsevier dates from 1800; the name was adopted from the 16th century Dutch family of printers. Elsevier was established in New York in 1937; Excerpta Medica was founded in 1946 and launched its EMBASE online database in 1960. The Elsevier Publishing Company was renamed Elsevier Scientific Publishers in 1979 and acquired Pergamon Press (from Maxwell) in 1991. 

Elsevier and Reed International merged two years later. US database giant LEXIS-NEXIS was acquired in 1994, followed by Thomson's legal publications and Chilton Business Group in 1997 and Matthew Bender & Shepard's in 1998. In 1998, Reed Elsevier completed the disposal of its consumer publishing interests, including IPC Magazines (subsequently acquired by AOL Time Warner).

It then absorbed Harcourt General, having unloaded some book publishers (KG Saur) and its travel industry and publishing directory interests (Official Airlines Guide, Worldwide Cahners Travel Group, Bowker) in 2000 and 2001.

In February 2007 Reed Elsevier has put the Harcourt K12 education arm up for sale, seeking between £1.6bn and £2.4bn. The move followed abandonment of the sector by competitors Wolters Kluwer and Thomson. The group announced that splitting out Harcourt's science and health operations, to be retained by Elsevier, the education arm was acquired for around £1.02bn. It forshadowed that a bidder could build an education publishing giant by combining Reed's US schools operations with Thomson's US tertiary-level business and Kluwers' European education assets.

     Harcourt

Harcourt's origins date back to German scientific publishing house Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, whose owners (Kurt Jacoby and Walter Johnson) escaped from the Nazis and founded the Academic Press in the US during 1942. (Johnson subsequently founded Johnson Reprint Corporation, rare book dealer Walter J Johnson and Ablex). Academic Press began as a journal publisher (Archives of Biochemistry & Biophysics and Journal of Colloid & Interface Sciences), subsequently becoming a leading publisher of scientific monographs and textbooks.

AP was acquired by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (HBJ) in 1969. HBJ resulted from William Jovanovich's acquisition of Harcourt Brace and was further expanded by purchase of Holt Rinehart Winston (founded in 1866). In 1986 HBJ acquired medical publisher WB Saunders from CBS.

In 1991 Harcourt Brace was acquired by General Cinema Corporation, a conglomerate with property, upmarket retailing, softdrink bottling and cinema holdings. The group's cinema and retailing holdings were spun off two years later; the cinema chain formed a partnership with Australia's Hoyts and is currently staving off bankruptcy. In 1998 Academic Press acquired IT publishers Morgan Kaufmann and Scivision.

In February 2007 Reed Elsevier announced plans to sell its Harcourt Education division (expected to fetch up to US$4.7bn) in order to focus on science, medical, legal and business-to-business operations. In May 2007 Pearson paid US$950m for Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International.

     Studies

There has been no major study of Reed or Elsevier.

For Iliffe see the first volume of Stephen Koss's two volume The Rise & Fall of the Political Press in Britain (London: Hamish Hamilton 1984) and the supplementary profile on this site. Henry Jones' Butterworths: History of A Publishing House (London: Butterworths 1980) is the official history. A broader view is provided in British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s (London: British Library 2004) by Eric de Bellaigue. For Newnes see Kate Jackson's George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880-1910: Culture & Profit (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001).

For Harcourt the major study, focussing on diversification by General Cinema, is Bettye Pruitt's The Making of Harcourt General: A History of Growth through Diversification, 1922-1992 (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1992).

     Holdings

The following page provides an indication of Elsevier holdings.




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