Product Launches

Peerless Media, the leading business-to-business publishing company in the supply chain, logistics and materials handling industries, announced yesterday that it has acquired Desktop Engineering, the premier brand in the product design engineering market, from Level 5 Communications Inc. in Cleveland, OH.

Just in time for Educause, Pearson on Monday announced its new REVEL platform, which it says replaces the traditional textbook and provides online learning tools for general studies courses. The platform aims to counter the "passive, laborious" materials of the past by engaging students with an interwoven combination of text, interactive exercises, infographics, social features, and videos, additionally allowing educators to track how much time students spend on the material.

To further engage and inspire English Language Learners, National Geographic Learning (NGL), part of global education company Cengage Learning, today announced a partnership with TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks.

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The authors are uniting. Last spring, when Amazon began discouraging customers from buying books published by Hachette, the writers grumbled that they were pawns in the retailer's contract negotiations over e-book prices. During the summer, they banded together and publicly protested Amazon's actions. Now, hundreds of other writers, including some of the world's most distinguished, are joining the coalition. Few if any are published by Hachette. And they have goals far broader than freeing up the Hachette titles. They want the Justice Department to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.

Sales in children's and YA publishing are up 10% in 2014 - an extraordinary performance against the backdrop of a market that is down 2% overall. And it's not just about new titles. The backlist is making a particularly strong showing in both picture books and children's fiction, with five of the current top 10 bestselling picture books dating from pre-2011 - including Judith Kerr's 46-year-old classic The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

At one time, Stephen King was on the cutting edge of ebook technology as one of the first big-name writers to release his works digitally. But for all the "bells and whistles" ebooks have, King says, nothing will be able to replace a physical book. King joined HuffPost Live on Wednesday to chat about his upcoming film, "A Good Marriage," though the conversation turned to future of the book industry.

Just as video (TV, Movies, or the more recent advent of self-produced videos) has been completely transformed by technological innovation, reading, too, is undergoing a great transformation. The strongest common denominator between the two is that technology succeeds or fails based on its ability to support the art of storytelling. The strides made in video-based storytelling and the proliferation of elegant software tools have made it possible for creative talent to endlessly think and rethink the art of video and what it means to communicate through that medium. 

Novelist Veronica Roth, just 26 years old, earned $17m (£10.5m) last year thanks to her dystopian young adult trilogy Divergent, making her one of the richest authors in the world, according to Forbes.

The list of the world's top-earning authors was released by Forbes on Monday. Topped by thriller writer James Patterson, it includes three names that have never appeared in the ranking before. Sixth-placed Roth, whose smash-hit stories are set in a world where people are defined and organised according to their dominant personality traits

Today Boundless launched another new way for entrepreneurial educators and thought leaders to engage students in a more modern way. The company's newest software opens up its content creation platform for authors to create textbooks that can be accessed through Boundless, which has been used by more than 3 million students and educators. Boundless's "new standard" for academic publishing is a major step in the company's expanding vision for changing the face of what has been a (financially) burdensome aspect of higher education: the existing, expensive academic textbook cartel.