Barry O'Callaghan and Riverdeep scaled new heights last year with the $5 billion takeover of US educational publisher Houghton Mifflin (HM). Mountain climber and author Jon Krakauer, though, is hoping to bring it back down to earth
Krakauer is suing HM and printer RR Donnelley & Sons for using extracts from his book Into Thin Air without permission.
The book chronicles Krakauer's Mount Everest expedition in 1996, which resulted in the death of five climbers.
HM and RR Donnelley made more than 1.2 million "unauthorised and impermissible" reproductions of Krakauer's tome in textbooks, according to a complaint filed on October 1st in a Denver federal court.
According to reports on Bloomberg, Krakauer claims that HM bought a licence to print no more than 40,000 copies of an excerpt for use in the ninth-grade schoolbook The Language of Literature.
He is seeking unspecified damages and a court order barring any further reproduction of the work.
We wonder if Krakauer has in any way been influenced by Riverdeep's projections that its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation following the acquisitions of HM and Reed Elsevier's educational arm will be about $1 billion.
