UPDATE: Hachette has confirmed the deal.
Consolidation at the top of the book publishing pyramid continues as Hachette Book Group is reported to have entered into an agreement to acquire Perseus Books Group in an unusual three-way deal that will have Hachette immediately selling the Perseus book and ebook distribution business to Ingram, the largest player in the content distribution market.
According to industry publication Publishers Lunch, which broke the story, the Hachette side of the deal executes on the company's stated strategy on investing more in nonfiction and in the U.S. (Perseus is mostly nonfiction and mostly in the U.S.); and on the Ingram side, it allows the big distributor to absorb its prime competitor in the book and ebook distribution business. Perseus will reportedly be run as a division of Hachette and will be absorbed whole by the company. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
With the merger between Penguin and Random House last year, bringing the two largest publishers in the world together, the other four largest -- Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster -- have been scrambling to increase in size as well. Earlier this year, HarperCollins acquired Harlequin, the largest romance publisher in the world, for nearly half-a-billion dollars. These three deals alone make 2013-2014 the busiest period in book publishing mergers and acquisitions in recent history.
Part of the impetus for achieving larger scale for already-large publishers is to have stronger negotiating positions with partners (like Amazon) and suppliers (like authors). Hachette is currently involved in a bitter negotiation with Amazon that has seen Amazon take actions to slow sales of Hachette titles on its platform.
Publishers Lunch has a very detailed account of the deal and its implications.
