Company
Profile
Simon & Schuster, Inc. is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, providing consumers worldwide with a diverse range of quality books and multimedia products across a wide variety of genres and formats. It is the publishing operation of Viacom Inc, one of the world?s premier media companies.
Simon & Schuster today is wholly focused on consumer publishing. Its seven divisions -- the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Children?s Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Online, Simon & Schuster UK, Simon & Schuster Canada and Simon & Schuster Australia - are home to some of the most distinguished imprints and recognizable brand names in the world of publishing, including Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Pocket Books, Downtown Press, The Free Press, Atria, Fireside, Touchstone, Washington Square Press, Atheneum, Margaret K. McElderrry, Aladdin Paperbacks, Little Simon, Simon Spotlight, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, Star Trek, MTV Books and Wall Street Journal Books.
Simon & Schuster was founded in 1924 by Richard L. (Dick) Simon and M. Lincoln (Max) Schuster. Their initial project was a crossword puzzle book, the first ever produced, which was a runaway bestseller. From that, the company has grown to become a multifaceted publishing house that publishes more than nearly 2000 titles annually. Simon & Schuster and its imprints have won 54 Pulitzer Prizes, and been the recipient of numerous National Book Awards and National Book Critics Circle Awards.
M. Lincoln (Max) Schuster and Richard L. (Dick) Simon
From the beginning, these two entrepreneurs approached the business in a much different manner than their more buttoned down colleagues along Publishers Row. The history of S&S is marked by numerous significant industry "firsts." Dick Simon and Max Schuster were aggressive marketers, often spending five to ten times more for advertising and promotion than their competitors: they were the first publisher to offer booksellers the privilege of returning unsold copies for credit; they were the first to apply mass market production and distribution techniques to books, and in 1939, with Robert Fair de Graff, launched the paperback revolution with the founding of Pocket Books, America?s first paperback publisher. In 1945, they published the first "instant book." And in 2000, Simon & Schuster became the first publisher to offer an original work by a major author exclusively in electronic form with the publication of Stephen King?s eBook Riding the Bullet, a worldwide publishing and media phenomenon.
In 1944, Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books were sold to department store magnate Marshall Field. Upon Field?s death in 1957, the company was repurchased by Simon, Schuster, Leon Shimkin and James M. Jacobson, who among them held it in various combinations of ownership until 1975, when Shimkin sold it to international conglomerate Gulf + Western.
In 1984, the company began a period of intense expansion through acquisition, acquiring more than 60 companies, including Prentice Hall and Silver, Burdett, and culminating with the 1994 acquisition of Macmillan Publishing Company. By adding these educational, professional, and reference imprints, the company saw revenue grow from ?200 million in 1983 to more than ?2 billion in 1997. Along the way, in 1989 Gulf + Western restructured to become Paramount Communications, and in 1994, shortly after the Macmillan acquisition, Viacom Inc. acquired Paramount. In 1998, the company sold its education, professional, and reference units to Pearson PLC. In 2002, Simon & Schuster was integrated with the Paramount motion picture and television studios as part of the Viacom Entertainment Group.
Today Simon & Schuster has come full circle, returning to its roots as a provider of entertainment and information for the general reader, albeit on a much larger scale than originally envisioned by its founders. Many Simon & Schuster titles are published globally, and its products -hardcovers, trade and mass market paperbacks, novelty formats, audio tapes and compact disks, interactive cd roms, and ebooks -- are distributed in 100 countries around the world. It continues to publish bestselling and critically-acclaimed fiction and nonfiction for readers of all ages, from the youngest to the oldest, covering every conceivable subject, category and taste.
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