{"id":270366,"date":"2009-04-15T13:49:13","date_gmt":"2009-04-15T13:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/04\/15\/didnt-we-read-this-story-just-a-few-months-ago\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:24:07","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:24:07","slug":"didnt-we-read-this-story-just-a-few-months-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/04\/15\/didnt-we-read-this-story-just-a-few-months-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Didn't We Read This Story Just a Few Months Ago?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday it was announced that Moody’s has downgraded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s rating,<\/a> which sounds sort of familiar . . . probably because they did the same thing last December.<\/a><\/p>\n

This isn’t good news for the Education Media & Publishing Group—which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands<\/a> and owns HMH<\/span>—but rather than pick on HMH<\/span> for its mishandling of Drenka Willen’s retirement,<\/a> or for telling the media about their freeze on acquisitions,<\/a> I’d rather just point out the frightening statistic that triggered this downgrading:<\/p>\n

\n

Moody’s maintains that HMH<\/span> remains vulnerable to state and local spending in the United States on so-called basal and supplemental K-12 (twelfth grade) educational publications. It says those categories posted a 22.8pc decline in sales in January 2009. (from Independent.ie<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A 22.8% decline in sales in one month is pretty severe, especially when talking about educational publications. Book sales overall were flat in January,<\/a> although they did plunge in February<\/a> (like all other retail sales) by more than 10%. <\/p>\n

On the positive side of things, Cees Nooteboom—one of Drenka’s authors—has been getting some good buzz for Nomad’s Hotel<\/em>, such as this write-up in Flavorpill’s Daily Dose.<\/a> And Filip Florian—another HMH<\/span> author whose Little Fingers<\/em><\/a> sounds pretty interesting, and is under review—will be the feature author at the Observer Translation Project<\/a> next month. <\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday it was announced that Moody’s has downgraded Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s rating, which sounds sort of familiar . . . probably because they did the same thing last December. This isn’t good news for the Education Media & Publishing Group—which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and owns HMH—but rather than pick on HMH for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[7176,2476,1836,22286,16946,1646],"class_list":["post-270366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-book-sales","tag-cees-nooteboom","tag-cwp","tag-filip-florian","tag-houghton-mifflin-harcourt","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":324086,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270366\/revisions\/324086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}