Media Source Owners To Buy Company
by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 6/2/2003
Media Source, the company that emerged out of the defunct book fair operator Pages Inc., is waiting for final approval to merge with MSI Merger Corp., formed last month by S. Robert Davis and his son Charles Davis. The Davises, the largest shareholders in Media Source, had controlled Pages.
After selling the majority of Pages' assets to Scholastic in 1998, the Davis family moved the Junior Library Guild division—its sole remaining asset—into Media Source. JLG sells children's books to schools and libraries on a subscription basis. In 2002, the company had sales of $7.4 million, an increase of 26% over 2001; net income rose 94%, to $2.4 million. At the end of 2002, JLG had approximately 10,000 customers to which it sold about 50,000 subscriptions, an 11% increase over 2001. During the year, it offered 183 new titles from a variety of publishers.
In this year's first quarter, sales rose 19%, to $2.1 million, and net income increased to $597,902 from $502,468. The company attributed the increase to a 33% increase in the number of subscriptions plus sales of $135,000 from the Reading Circle, a company that sells trade and reference books to the school and library market, which Media Source acquired last November.
