Book of the Month
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Book of the Month Club (founded 1926) is a United States mail-order book sales club that offers a new book each month to customers.
The Book of the Month Club is part of a larger company that runs many book clubs in the United States and Canada. It was formerly the flagship club of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc. That company merged with Doubleday Direct, Inc., a company owned by Bertelsmann, in 2000. The resulting company, Bookspan, was a joint-venture between Time Warner and Bertelsmann until 2007 when Bertelsmann took over complete ownership. Approximately six weeks after it acquired complete ownership of Bookspan, Bertelsmann initiated a major overhaul of the book club business, a process that will eliminate 280 positions, or about 15% of its workforce of 1,900. Many of the specialty book clubs such as conservative club American Compass were eliminated.
In 2008, Bookspan (along with DVD club Columbia House) was sold to the private equity firm Najafi Companies.