As of: January 31, 2024, 12:05 p.m
By: Sven Trautwein
The Munich subsidiary of the Bertelsmann Group has to save money and wants to reorganize itself.
Initially, 60 employees will leave on a voluntary basis, and further positions will then be eliminated by 2027.
In 1835 the C. Bertelsmann publishing house was founded.
Today, around 40 publishers belong to Penguin Random House, including large general interest publishers such as Heyne, Goldmann and DVA.
Bestsellers from the company can regularly be found on the bestseller lists, including currently “Mindful murder through conscious nutrition” by Karsten Dusse or Christopher Paolini’s “Murtagh – A Phantom Menace”.
Now ten percent of the workforce should leave.
According to media reports, Penguin Random House plans to cut one in ten jobs.
© Hendrik Schmidt/dpa
According to its own information, Penguin Random House employs almost 1,000 people.
The
Süddeutsche Zeitung
reports that employees were informed about the savings at a general meeting.
The first jobs will be eliminated in some areas of the company this year.
More positions will follow over the coming years.
According to media reports, there will be no layoffs or terminations.
Job cuts at Penguin Random House: changes in the book market
The book market is subject to major changes.
Rising prices for energy and paper caused manufacturing costs to rise.
Hardcovers are already very expensive.
Publishers have also seen changing purchasing behavior for years.
Online book sales are not increasing significantly.
Many readers also bought original English-language titles, making it difficult for publishers to plan for translations and publications in German, according to the industry magazine
buchreport.
Germany is the most important market for Penguin Random House.
According to
buchreport
, sales in recent years have been around 320 million euros per year.
There were also changes in bookstores in general.
The German Book Trade Association announced that the number of bookstores has been steadily declining in recent years.
Here you will find a list of ten beautiful bookstores in Germany.
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The German book group is a subsidiary of Penguin Random House, the world's largest book publisher, which is headquartered in New York and wholly owned by the Bertelsmann media group based in Gütersloh.
Penguin Random House brings together 300 independent book publishers globally, publishing more than 16,000 new titles every year.
This accounts for around 20 percent of new releases on the German book market.
Sales figures are over 700 million books, e-books and audio books every year.