McGraw-Hill Companies

For the past eight years, BISG’s Making Information Pay — a concise, half-day conference — has provided useful direction to thousands of book publishing professionals looking to build more profitable businesses through data-first thinking. The quantity and variety of data available to companies for driving business decisions is exploding. To remain relevant, organizations need to develop strategies for gathering, analyzing, and acting on this flood of information about who, what, when, where, why, and how. But how do companies properly plug into, make sense of, and act on these vast, sometimes disparate, data sets?

Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) today unveiled its newly installed Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), a Xerox Solution—a cutting-edge technology that offers patrons instant access to more than eight million titles printed in any language, and allows Brooklyn authors to self-publish their work on-site.  The machine is up and running in the Library’s main branch at Grand Army Plaza, making BPL one of the first public libraries of its size to install the machine permanently.

Amazon's Movers & Shakers, the ranking of books that see the biggest sales increase in the past 24 hours, is dominated by fiction titles on the Kindle side and nonfiction titles on the physical side. As of the morning of February 24, in the Kindle Movers & Shakers list top 10, there was only one nonfiction title: How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. In the physical Movers & Shakers top 10, however, seven of the top 10 were nonfiction titles, including the top six. The book that saw the biggest sales increase on the physical list was Ownership Thinking:

In a concerted action, a global group of publishers and publishers' associations achieved an important success in the fight against copyright piracy on the Internet. Overcoming significant technical and legal obstacles, the publishers were able to locate the alleged operators of two high-traffic rogue Web sites, the sharehoster service, www.ifile.it, and the link library, www.library.nu, and to serve judicial cease-and-desist orders to them. These sites have now shut down.

All Things D's live blog from the Apple education event.

Greetings! We’re here at New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum, awaiting the start of Apple’s “Education Announcement”. The expectation is that we’ll hear about new publishing tools that allow educators and others to create their own iPad-friendly textbooks, but we should know soon enough. The event is slated to kick off at 10 am eastern time, but we’ll start chatting live, now.

At a press conference in New York, Apple has revealed its next target: the humble school textbook. It has released iBooks 2, an updated version of the e-reader app that introduces functionality for educational textbooks on iPad. Apple also released iBooks Author, a free self-publishing tool, and, in the final blow of its education barrage, Apple released an iTunes U app for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. This gives you instant access to that bumper selection of free educational content from schools around the world.

From the Indiana University press release: As textbooks continue shifting to digital, Internet2, McGraw-Hill and Courseload today announced implementation of an eText Pilot Trial Pack to students and faculty at five universities for the Spring 2012 semester. The five institutions, also Internet2 members, include: University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University; University of Minnesota; University of [...]

Cambridge University Press was founded in 1534 and is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Dedicated to excellence, its purpose is to further the University's objective of advancing learning, knowledge and research worldwide.

To better connect publishers with their audience (and give them a shot at acquiring new readers), Link.me has been forging partnerships with the top book publishers to launch trials, deals, promotions, and more through QR codes. In October, Link.me signed with its newest client, McGraw-Hill, and as an example of the kind of work they’re doing, one of the publishing company’s recent publications, “The Zappos Experience” embedded QR codes in over 15 individual chapters. The goal was, of course, to bring The Zappos Experience “to life."

The McGraw-Hill Companies today announced an agreement to sell its nine-station Broadcasting Group which it called a "non-strategic asset" to The E. W. Scripps Company for $212 million in cash.