McGraw-Hill Companies

McGraw-Hill Professional, a leading global provider of print and electronic content and services for the business, education, technical and medical communities, and OverDrive, the world's largest eBook, audiobook, music and video lending service for schools and libraries, announced today that McGraw-Hill Professional's eBook catalog is now available for K-12 school libraries and public libraries worldwide. 

Print or digital? Digital or print? Sick of that debate yet?

We are learning, we are adapting, but book publishers need to envision the industry beyond popular technology over which they have little influence. These will not save the book. 

In 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) filed for bankruptcy protection. In July of this year, Cengage Learning did the same, hoping to eliminate $4 billion in debt. Earlier in the year, McGraw-Hill completed the sale of its entire education division. And though HMH has since emerged nearly debt free and is seeking an IPO, clearly these are signs that disruptive changes are underway in educational publishing.

While Apple (AAPL) and its iBookstore wait for the DOJ to finalize its punishment in the wake of an e-book price fixing conviction, Google (GOOG) is swooping in to take on the company in the growing e-textbook market. This fall, Google Play will be joining Amazon (AMZN), Barnes & Noble (BKS) and Apple - along with a bevy of smaller players - in offering college and high school students a digital alternative to those 10 pound paper textbooks.

The AAP General Annual Meeting went really well.  There were roughly 200 people in attendance.  Since the International Publishers Association http://www.internationalpublishers.org/ was holding a global meeting in NY that same week, we also had a number of representatives from other countries’ trade associations in attendance.

It’s easy enough to understand why Curious George books are first grade fare and why Camus is often saved for the 12th grade. But what about all the books in between?

For the most part, teachers and literacy experts are the ones charged with considering sentence complexity, word difficulty, themes and other characteristics to judge the readability of text. But by turning over much of that analysis to algorithms, startup Unbound Concepts believes it can not only assess more text with more granularity, it can individualize education for K-12 students and…

Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content delivery solutions, today announced the commercial launch of a new title acquisitions system for libraries that enables library staff to order eBooks for their collections directly from participating publishers. Impelsys' new eBook Ordering System was developed in partnership with Douglas County Libraries (DCL), a seven-branch public library system in Douglas County, Colorado. The eBook acquisition dashboard was beta tested by DCL's professional staff and system modifications were made prior to commercial launch this week.

Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content delivery solutions, today announced the release of iPublishCentral 4.1, the latest version of its award-winning digital publishing software for publishers. iPublishCentral is a comprehensive platform that allows publishers to warehouse, deliver, distribute, market and sell their eBooks without making significant capital or engineering resource investments on their own. This means that publishers are able to quickly monetize their digital assets by selling eBooks to institutions, retail partners and directly to consumers.

Steve Earle wrote: “The revolution starts now / when you rise above your fear / And tear the walls around you down / The revolution starts here.”

Thankfully, time has finally brought us companies (big and small) that are re-thinking traditional content distribution business models. They’ve done this based on shifting technologies, shifting culture, sinking economies, new demands, and have begun creating new approaches. There are many out there, I wanted to mention a few examples.