Acquisitions · Publishing software and book marketing
Media Do buys US publishing tech firms Firebrand and NetGalley for about $14 million
- Buyer
- Media Do (via Media Do International) (Tokyo)
- Target
- Firebrand Technologies and NetGalley, Newburyport, Massachusetts
- Value
- About ¥1.48B (about $14M) for both companies
- Status
- Completed in late January 2021. On October 6, 2026, Montreal-based Valsoft announced it had bought the Firebrand Group (Firebrand, NetGalley and Supadu) from Media Do International; terms were not disclosed.
- Date
- 2020-10-13
Japanese e-book distributor Media Do bought Quality Solutions (Firebrand Technologies) and NetGalley, two Massachusetts companies that manage book data and help publishers market new titles to reviewers. The price was about ¥924 million and ¥554 million. Founder Fran Toolan, who started the group in 1987, stayed on to run it.
Why it matters
Media Do had resold NetGalley in Japan since 2016. Owning the US firms gave it tools to modernize Japanese publishers and a customer base of over 500 publishers abroad.
What the companies do
Firebrand's software tracks a book from before it is signed through production, marketing and sales, sends book data to retailers in the ONIX standard, and checks EPUB files for errors. NetGalley, which Firebrand bought in 2008, lets publishers share early copies with reviewers, librarians and booksellers, and runs sites in the US, UK, France, Germany and Japan. Together the two had sales of about ¥1.15 billion.
The buyer
Media Do bought them through Media Do International in San Diego. At the time Media Do held the largest share of Japan's e-book market, which it put at $3.7 billion. Toolan agreed to stay as chief executive for at least three years.
Sources
Kakehashi M&A News home
