Backlist Drives Print Book Unit Gains Higher Through February (publishersweekly.com)

S&P Global and IHS Markit announced an agreement to sell IHS Markit's Oil Price Information Services (OPIS); Coal, Metals and Mining; and PetroChem Wire businesses to News Corp in a cash transaction valued at approximately $1.150 billion. The sale is expected to be completed at the close of the merger between S&P Global and IHS Markit. The agreement marks the culmination of S&P Global and IHS Markit's previously announced decision to explore a divestiture of these businesses and represents an important milestone on the path to regulatory approval for the merger between S&P Global and IHS Markit.

The U.S. Postal Service today released a First-Year Progress Report on Delivering for America (DFA), its 10-year plan to return the organization to financial sustainability and achieve service excellence while maintaining universal six-day mail delivery and expanding seven-day package delivery. “We have made significant progress in the first year of our Delivering for America plan, but our work is far from over,” said Postmaster General and Chief Executive Officer Louis DeJoy. “Our employees are playing an integral role in the advancement of the plan. As we continue to implement components of the plan, we expect to significantly improve on-time delivery performance, operational capacity, precision and efficiency, and to do so in a financially sustainable manner over the coming decade. Delivering for America is helping to drive a new sense of purpose and focus across all levels in the organization.” Key milestones in the first year of DFA include: Reversing decades of losses; Improvements in on-time national service performance; Streamlined organizational functions; Conversion of nearly 63,000 pre-career employees into career positions; New standards to provide service reliability for customers and more

South Dakota’s Supreme Court affirms a lower court ruling against a state law designed to challenge the prevailing law that allows many online retailers to avoid collecting sales tax. Since the birth of e-commerce, online retailers have been shielded from the requirement to collect sales tax from consumers who live in those states where the retailer does not have a physical presence, such as an office, store or warehouse. The U.S. Supreme Court likely will soon have the chance to change that. The question of whether out-of-state online retailers can be required to collect sales tax moved a big step closer to the nation’s highest court today when the South Dakota Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision barring enforcement of a 2016 state law that requires larger e-retailers to collect sales tax from South Dakota residents and remit them to the state. Click Read More below for additional detail.