Berkery, Noyes & Co. advises DDC Publishing in its sale to Pearson Education

NEW YORK, April 15, 2002 — Joseph Berkery, President of Berkery, Noyes & Co., announced that his firm represented DDC Publishing, formerly The Dictation Disc Company, a provider of software training titles to the high school and post-secondary markets, in its sale to Pearson Education.

Pearson Education is already a leader in the higher education and professional IT publishing market with well-known imprints like SAMS, Cisco Press, Adobe Press, Addison-Wesley, New Riders, and others. With DDC as a new asset, Pearson will be able to offer a comprehensive line of computer-related publications and teacher training and assessment materials through its Prentice Hall School division. DDC Publishing, founded in 1946, currently publishes more than 400 software-training titles and ancillary products for high schools, colleges, corporations, governmental organizations, and individuals and home users.

About Pearson Education

With offices in 33 countries, Pearson Education is the world’s leading education business. Its brands include Addison Wesley, Allyn & Bacon, Benjamin Cummings, Longman, Pearson Learning, Prentice Hall, NCS Pearson, and Scott Foresman. Pearson Education is the global leader in online learning with nearly 2,000 textbook companion Web sites, NCS Learn (the InformIT portal for technology professionals), and Pearson’s Learning Network (the award-winning learning portal for parents, teachers, and children). Pearson Education is the global education business of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the international media group. For more information, visit www.pearsoned.com.

About DDC Publishing

DDC Publishing is a recognized computer textbook publisher, focusing on high schools and post-secondary institutions. DDC Publishing offers more than 400 software and computer training products to a variety of markets.

About Berkery, Noyes & Co.

Berkery, Noyes specializes in investment banking for the information, publishing and communications industries. Among the most recent transactions completed by Berkery, Noyes is the sale of selected assets from Thomson Learning to John Wiley & Sons and Oxford University Press, the acquisition of Ariel Research Corporation by Eastman Chemical Company, the sale of Mayfield Publishing Company to The McGraw-Hill Companies, The Thomson Corporation’s divestiture of Institutional Shareholder Services to Proxy Monitor, Inc., John Wiley & Sons’ purchase of selected higher education textbooks from Pearson Education, and the sale of R.R. Bowker LLC, a unit of Reed Elsevier Inc. to Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, L.P.

Berkery, Noyes & Co. clients range from small firms, often seeking a buyer, to most of the major international information companies, who use the firm’s expertise in locating, analyzing and negotiating with acquisition candidates, as well as in managing divestitures. The firm operates with a staff of twenty-two professionals serving the information and publishing industry from offices in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.