Product Launches

Publishing conglomerates Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are facing tough times this quarter as ebook sales fell and total profit dropped 5.6% at S&S and approximately 12% for RPH. The potential culprits? A lack of blockbuster books and low ebook sales. While ebooks sales are still dwarfed by paperback and hardback sales, publishers are now seeing even less revenue from their recently repriced bits. Now that many ebooks are selling well above the $9.99 price that was common early in the Kindle days.

March 2 is Dr. Seuss's birthday, or, rather, the day 111 years ago when Theodor Seuss Geisel, the famous children's author, was born, and for years, thousands of schools around the country have celebrated the day with book readings ("Cat in the Hat, "Green Eggs and Ham," etc.) and Seuss character costumes. This year, some of those celebrations have been changed. Why? It's the start of the spring 2015 testing season, and at many schools students will be taking PARCC Core standardized tests instead.

Tools, technologies for publishers looking to enhance their readers’ experience; moving seamlessly between print, mobile, and online.

Intellectuals always worry about the decline of literary culture. Much like ​racists opine over an all-white, all-fantastic Britain that never was, they assume there was a golden age of books-a time when the massed ranks of the workforce were reading Dostoevsky and Kafka and arguing about the use of symbolism in late-period Henry James while jostling through the factory gates. But shitty stuff has always outsold the highbrow. Around the time Herman Melville was writing his masterpiece about a whale hunt and the inscrutability of the universe, most readers were devouring crappy bodice-rippers about heroines in trouble. 

Progressively, photographers who choose to self-publish are taking it to the next level. They're turning one-time hits into more permanent structures that release works by other artists. Many have chosen this avenue as a way to snub the major publishers who are increasingly asking their authors to bring not only a great body of work, but also a check. "I find it insane and unacceptable that renowned publishing houses are asking photographers to come up with half, if not all, of the funds needed to produce a book."

A whopping 73 percent of kids report the they would read more if they could find more books that they liked, according to a new report by Scholastic. The Kids & Family Reading Report: Fifth Edition, which comes out entirely in January, examines the reading habits of kids 6-17. The research reveals that  70 percent of kids want to read a book that will make them laugh when reading for fun and 54 percent like reading books that allow them to use their imagination.

A handful of large school districts are aggressively pushing big publishers and other providers of digital content to overhaul the way they deliver instructional materials, a movement that experts say could upend long-established purchasing patterns and help educators more easily access materials from multiple vendors. The movement is being led by the 215,000-student district here and the 187,000-student Orange County, Fla., schools, which have declared they will no longer do business with content vendors that do not adopt "interoperability standards" put forth by the IMS Global Learning Consortium, a Lake Mary, Fla.-based nonprofit membership organization. 

Print has been good to Jeffery Deaver. Over the last 26 years, Mr. Deaver, a lawyer-turned-thriller writer, has published 35 novels and sold 40 million copies of them globally. But his latest work, "The Starling Project," a globe-spanning mystery about a grizzled war crimes investigator, isn't available in bookstores. It won't be printed at all. The story was conceived, written and produced as an original audio drama for Audible, the audiobook producer and retailer. If Mr. Deaver's readers want the story, they'll have to listen to it

Publishers Weekly, the U.S. trade magazine, recently ran an article confirming that the number of seven-figure advances for novels is actually on the rise. It lists several recent acquisitions by big American publishing houses, mostly for debut novels, that involved payouts of more than $1-million. That's right - debut novels. You might be wondering if you read that right, given what else you have heard recently about the demise of book publishing and the alleged poverty of respected authors.

A decade after the Nazis' 1933 book burnings, the U.S. War Department and the publishing industry did the opposite, printing 120 million miniature, lightweight paperbacks for U.S. troops to carry in their pockets across Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. The books were Armed Services Editions, printed by a coalition of publishers with funding from the government and shipped by the Army and Navy. The largest of them were only three-quarters of an inch thick-thin enough to fit in the pocket of a soldier's pants. Soldiers read them on transport ships, in camps and in foxholes.