In March 2006, Holtzbrinck forced Tor Books, which is owned by Holtzbrinck, to stop making its books available as e-books via Baen Ebooks because of concerns regarding the lack of digital rights management (DRM). The policy was later changed and Tor titles became available as DRM-free e-books in 2012. The Tor UK label in Britain (and hence the EU) does the same. The company also received a good deal of attention when it bought the then leading German social networking platform StudiVZ in January 2007.
Holtzbrinck has total annual sales of 2.1 billion euros (as of 2005); 49% of sales are in Germany and 23% in North America. It had 2005 earnings before taxes of 142 million euros, and a total of 14,000 employees.
The current chairman of the group is Stefan von Holtzbrinck. Don Weisberg is CEO of Macmillan, the company that unites the US-based businesses of the group. Previous CEOs of Macmillan include John Sargent.[8]
^Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. "Management". Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck. Archived from the original on 30 July 2013. Retrieved 1 April 2013.
^O'Toole, Fintan. "Empire of publishing built on barbarism". The Irish Times. Archived from the original on 16 October 2017. Retrieved 15 January 2022. The founder of the firm, Georg von Holtzbrinck, was until the early 1930s an impoverished student who sold books door to door. He joined a Nazi student group in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power. He became a member of the Nazi Party in 1933, and stayed loyal to it until the end of the war.
^"Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck". mediadb.eu. Archived from the original on 28 October 2011. Retrieved 15 January 2022. Denn Georg von Holtzbrinck sei „ein wichtiger Akteur" in der Buchhandels- und Verlagsgeschichte im Dritten Reich gewesen. Er war Mitglied der NSDAP, aber nicht als fanatischer Nazi in Erscheinung getreten.
Mary H. Munroe (2004). "Holtzbrinck Timeline". The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition. Archived from the original on 20 October 2014 – via Northern Illinois University.