Library reference losing out to free web sources - Anonymous employee Cengage Employee Review

3.0
Jun 3, 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great publishing legacy, including many award-winning reference titles, groundbreaking digital archive products that have transformed many people's worldviews and aided researcher's discoveries.

Cons

Decades ago, the company placed its bets on reference publishing, acquiring many publishing imprints. They didn't foresee the emergence of Wikipedia and many other free internet sources that would make such publishing irrelevant. They also continue to rely on standing orders to various print series, and have been struggling to effectively migrate this revenue stream to an online business model. The only successful branch is their digital archive business where they publish historical primary source material for scholars, but here too they are beginning to run out of killer content and free internet sources are catching up.

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1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The individuals below the management level are good people, with some good people at management but C-Suite is horrible.

Cons

C-Suite hides their plans under corporate speak. Cengage was a family owned private company and they sold and ever since then has had, debt, schemes to shuffle and restructure debt while implementing RIFs after RIFs after RIFs...never ending and amazingly has been in increased this last year. From their actions it's outsource as much as you can of company operations and squeeze value from Intellectual Property. Look how many times they've renamed themselves. They had a CTO join for about a month or two until she realized it was a role with no team, no authority and left. The CEO is amazing at spin, you hear "great, great, great" corporate speak as the reality on the ground is "this failed, that failed..what!? they're gone!...what they moved that department offshore!...what!? that department is now a vendor relationship...oh we're not DEI focused because the wind changed". The trend is contraction not expansion, no ground breaking innovation. My jaded view from college on expensive books has only grew since I see how the sausage is made.

5
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