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Bloomsbury has put seen a 9% drop in revenue over the three months to 31st May 2014, which chief executive Nigel Newton explained as "a quiet quarter".
Total revenues at the publisher were down 9% compared to the same period in 2013, when they had been up 19% on the year before. In an interim management statement, the company said revenue for the quarter was 7% up compared to the same period in 2012.
It added that revenues were up in its academic and professional business, which won the Academic, Education and Professional Publisher of the Year award for the second year running at the Bookseller Industry Awards in May. http://www.thebookseller.com/news/blackwells-and-little-brown-scoop-top-... Revenues were also up in children's, but had fallen for the adult division.
Digital sales accounted for 12% of total revenue, compared to the same period last year, while1 rights and services revenues were up 2% in the period.
At 30th June 2014, the Bloomsbury group held cash of £2.9m, compared to £8.5m on the same date in 2013, due to the acquisitions of Fairchild Books and Applied Visual Arts Publishing and the acquisition of Hart Publishing, paid over the past year.
Newton said: "We continue to develop Bloomsbury as a wholly integrated trade and academic publisher. This is traditionally a quiet quarter for us. We remain well positioned to benefit from a strong publishing programme, including powerful new titles from Margaret Atwood, Paul Hollywood and Tom Kerridge later this year."
The statement added that "online knowledge hubs " were a core part of the business, with investment in online platforms increasing. Bloomsbury Collections, which delivers online collections of scholarly e-books for the library market, has soft-launched ahead of a full launch in September, with 3,000 titles planned for inclusion by February 2015.
Successful books for the publisher over the past three months include editions of Khaled Hosseini's And the Mountains Echoed released in paperback in May, and A Spy Among Friends by Ben Mcintyre, released in hardback in March. In children's, the Harry Potter Box Set and John Green's Paper Towns, published in December and boosted by the success and film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars (Penguin), and is soon to be turned into a film by Fox 2000.