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overview
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overview
This profile considers the Springer Scientific+Business
Media conglomerate, one of the three largest scientific
and professional publishing groups.
It covers -
The
group results from merger of BertelsmannSpringer (sold
by Bertelsmann in 2003)
with Kluwer Academic Publishers (sold by Wolters
Kluwer in 2002). It is unrelated to the Axel
Springer mass media group. Major competitors include
Elsevier, Blackwell,
Wolters Kluwer and Thomson.
introduction
Springer traces its origins to establishment of a Berlin
bookshop by Julius Springer (1847-1877) in 1842. Springer
published a handful of literary, general and political
periodicals in the years leading up to the 1848 revolution
but thereafter concentrated on scholarly books (particularly
in forestry, medicine and pharmacology) and technical
journals. The bookshop was sold in 1858; Julius' sons
Fritz (1850-1944) and Ferdinand (1846-1906) emphasised
the physical sciences, engineering and medicine. In 1889
Springer was responsible for 20 science journals. That
climbed to 40 by 1911, 106 in 1928 and 128 in 1933. It
gained a dominant position in Germany and a major international
profile for scientific publishing, with over 60% of its
revenue originating outside Germany in 1931.
The group's advance was disrupted by hyper-inflation during
the early Weimar Republic and Aryanisation under the Third
Reich, which saw threats to Julius' grandson's Ferdinand
Jr (1881-1965) and Julius Jr (1880-1968) and the exile
or death of many of the figures who authored/edited the
publications. Julius Sr's son Ernst Springer (1860-1944),
a lawyer and general manager of the Bleichröder bank,
died after deportation to the Theresienstadt concentration
camp. Fritz took poison when the Gestapo arrived to deport
him. Associate Tönjes Lange managed to retain some
control of the Springer group.
In 1945 the Springer family sought to protect their interests,
and those of their authors, through a UK-based joint venture.
Unfortunately that came under control of Robert Maxwell:
BertelsmannSpringer
In 1999 Bertelsmann
acquired a controlling stake in Springer Verlag, complementing
its acquisition of UK and US publishers such as Doubleday
and Random House. Bertelsmann - particularly through its
Bertelsmann Fachzeitschriften arm - had been acquiring
technical/professional journals and some scientific and
medical publishing houses.
BertelsmannSpringer, formed through that acquisition,
proceeded to buy specialist publishers, electronic information
services, journals, consultancies and even driving schools.
Much of that expansion appears to have been problematical,
reflected in sales and management buyouts within five
years. As with competitors Taylor
& Francis, Thomson,
Elsevier and Wolters
Kluwer it was marked by complaints that journal prices
were increasing beyond the capacity of the consumers (particularly
university libraries), that concentration in the scientific
& technical information (STI) publishing sector was
excessive and that authors/editors did not share in the
substantial revenue gained by publishers. In 2003 the
US Information Access Alliance for example commented that
during past 20 years the prices paid by libraries for
journals rose at three times the rate of inflation.
M&A specialists dismissed such concerns, arguing that
journals would continue to proliferate, margins would
remain respectable and major publishers would not be fundamentally
affected by 'open access' academic publishing
In 2002 London-based private equity funds Candover and
Cinven acquired Kluwer Academic Publishers (KAP) from
Wolters Kluwer. KAP at that time operated worldwide from
offices in Dordrecht, New York, Boston, London and Moscow.
It employed some 600 people worldwide, annually publishing
around 1,200 book titles per year and 675 scientific journals.
Cinven (founded 1977) and Candover (1980) had previously
invested in specialist and mass media. Cinven for example
had acquired the healthcare and business publishing activities
of Vivendi Universal in April
2002 and had formerly owned academic journal and book
publisher Routledge (subsequently acquired by Taylor &
Francis).
During 2003 Cinven and Candover agreed to buy BertelsmannSpringer
from Bertelsmann for €1.05 billion, reported as
over ten times the current pre-tax profit.
BertelsmannSpringer at that time published over 700 journals
and trade magazines and some 4,000 new book titles per
year. It comprised 70 publishing houses, with over 5,000
employees in 16 countries.
The new owners stated an intention to increase the new
entity's profit margin to 38%, in line with Elsevier Science.
Together KAP and BertelsmannSpringer would encompass 20%
of the science journals market, measured by the number
of commercial titles included in the Institute for Scientific
Information citation database.
Studies
Springer-Verlag
was examined in Heinz Sarkowski's Springer-Verlag:
History of a Scientific Publishing House, 1842-1945 (Foundation,
Maturity, Adversity) (Berlin: Springer 1996) and
Heinz Götze's Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific
Publishing House, 1945-1992 (Rebuilding, Opening Frontiers,
Securing the Future) (Berlin: Springer 1996). A short
version of Sarkowski's monograph appears as a chapter
in A Century of Science Publishing (Amsterdam:
IOS Press 2001) edited by Einar Fredriksson, which also
features an account of Maxwell and Pergamon.
The cascade of acquisitions in recent years mean that
BertelsmannSpringer and its successor accumulated a range
of publishing houses, including some - such as JF Lehmanns
- with a repellent past. Lehmann's activity as a propagandist
for antisemitism is explored in Die "rechte Nation"
und ihr Verleger: Politik und Popularisierung im J. F.
Lehmanns Verlag 1890-1979 (Berlin: Lehmanns 2002)
edited by Sigrid Stöckel and Entrepreneurs of
Ideology: Neoconservative Publishers in Germany, 1890-1933
(Chapel Hill: Uni of North Carolina Press 1981) by Gary
Stark.
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