Top Hat, the Canadian ed tech company, is to buy 400 textbook titles from Nelson Education Ltd, also of Canada. The educational publishing market has been growing during the Covid lockdowns.
The deal is thought to be worth $30m and moves Top Hat to being a major college textbook publisher, while Nelson will concentrate on its school year related textbook publishing.
Top Hat was founded in 2009 by Mike Silagadze as the “iTunes for academia”. He predicts that digital publishing will dominate the college market by 2023: “Physical books will be weird, and students will wonder what you’re doing if you’re assigning a physical book and charging $200 for it.”
