Odyssey of Publishing

Note: Chapman & Hall was a division of Thomson (ITP), but was acquired in January by Kluwer Academic Publishers and Lippincott-Raven Publishers (see the January press release and further history below). ITP has a stock of my book and will continue to sell it throught August. Chapman & Hall book series was bought in Summer 1998 by to CRC Press (their math/stat editor is Bob Stern, 561/998-2549). CRC is keeping the C&H name for books in Statistical Science. See the CRC Press online catalog.

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Further History of Publishing

As some of you know, the publishing industry has been going through a whirlwind of mergers and acquisitions during the 90s. I originally signed with Wadsworth/Brooks Cole, which later sold my title (along with about 75 others) to Van Norstrand Reinhold (VNR), which in turn eventually sold them to Chapman & Hall. At that time, C&H had offices in the US and UK for math & stat. During my tenure, they closed the US offices. As indicated above, C&H was sold to Kluwer, which in turn is spinning off the books to CRC Press. Kluwer had earlier planned to merge with Elsevier, but this was discouraged by the EC in Europe.

Notice that these mergers have occurred alongside similar (and sometimes the same) patterns among journals. Consider the costs of today's journals, and the few number of publishers still in the business.


Last modified: Tue Dec 22 13:47:26 1998 by Brian Yandell (yandell@stat.wisc.edu)