Who owns nelson publishing
This small bookstore began laying the foundation for a rich history of publishing high-quality inspirational and Christian content. Since its humble beginnings, Thomas Nelson has remained dedicated to acquiring, developing, and promoting authors whose content inspires, informs, and transforms the lives of readers. With the purchase of a bindery in Camden, New Jersey, Nelson Publishers became one of the few publishers to manufacture completely in America. The company eventually expanded into the publication of Bibles, textbooks, and church literature.
Since then, it has published eight other translations of the Bible. Since the late s, the company has experienced explosive growth. It acquired Word Publishing and the C.
We also went through a physical-to-digital transformation. Ultimately, we sold the business, and we broke that up into individual pieces. And those businesses are now running under other ownership throughout the world.
Edwin is being sold on a yearly, licensed basis to school boards, as software loaded onto two-in-one devices that function as both a laptop and touch-screen tablet which Nelson effectively rents to school boards. Edwin is also sold for an annual fee as software only. The content Nelson publishes is agnostic to the medium, whether print or digital.
The company is just making it more accessible, he said. The way that we relay content to each other through metadata tagging and curriculum alignment is far more 21st century," he said. But the core business of publishing educational material "will be the same. After new owners acquired Nelson in , Mr.
Brown was brought on board two and a half years ago, ushering in a series of acquisitions and partnerships, many of them digitally focused, such as a distribution partnership with American education resource giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, partly to expand its catalogue of material on Edwin, Nelson said at the time.
Brown has seen serious, industry-flipping disruption before, as the former chief executive of Cinram. The strategy now at Nelson is to change the company before the company is forced to change.
Stephanie Lai, content developer at Nelson Education, demonstrates Edwin, a research platform for school children. Regardless of the interest Mr. Brown says that Edwin is getting from educators, Nelson is introducing the platform into a chaotic world of severe educational cutbacks and unequal access to computers in crowded classrooms and lower-income schools.
The barrier is typically cost. Replacing a classroom set of textbooks can cost thousands of dollars, but then those books last for years. Comparing that expense to an annual licensing fee for digital textbooks, e-books and learning platforms requires a broad overview of all learning costs, not just a simplistic comparison between the cost of print textbook to a digital one.
Rivett said. The annual fee for Edwin involves schools handing the two-in-one devices back to Nelson. Nelson cleans them up and repurposes them, but the educational resources published by Nelson and its partners remain stored in the cloud. The Nelson acquisition would give HarperCollins a significant chunk of the religion trade and Bible markets, though how big that chunk would be is hard to quantify. The size of those markets is notoriously difficult to estimate; books with religion content span many genres, and publishers define what is a religion book in different ways.
Sometimes they choose not to categorize their books as religion at all, in part because of shelving issues. Thomas Nelson has undergone other ownership changes in the past several years. Zondervan, which was acquired by HarperCollins in , is also seeing significant changes these days.
The division will close its warehouse in Grand Rapids, Mich. Donnelley for all HarperCollins U. Zondervan will give up its lease on the headquarters and warehouse complex and will be searching for a new location in the Grand Rapids area for its editorial and remaining back-office functions.