Penguin Books

Last week, Alliant International University (AIU), a private US college announced an intriguing scholarly publishing partnership with Author Solutions, the self-publishing arm of Penguin Random House. Together the two organizations said they were creating Alliant Press, a university press that would be built using Author Solutions infrastructure and be dedicated to publishing “academic works of…

Building buzz for a book used to be a pretty straightforward endeavor. Finagle a book review at a leading mass media outlet like The New York Times and the title was sure to be a bestseller. As media has moved to digital, though, discoverability of books has become much more fragmented. While a review in NYT is nothing to sniff at today, there are other players that book marketers should be targeting.

is is an appropriate time to consider the power of Penguin Random House's position in the marketplace. It is very strong. If I were any of the other four major publishers, I would fear PRH more than Amazon as a potential disruptor of my business. When I put that proposition to a UK-based executive of one of those companies at the London Book Fair last week, he readily agreed with me.

When one considers what a segmented business publishing is, the Penguin Random House combination becomes that much more eye-catching.

Penguin Random House relaunched its website yesterday, designing the new platform to drive book discovery and build community -- and perhaps most importantly, collect data. The trade publisher has listed its entire catalog on the site, complete with author pages, book recommendations, interactive games, and an ecommerce platform. It released a brief video which shared the site's new features and emphasized that it is a place where readers can come to find the books they love and discover new ones.

Penguin Books turns 80 this year. To celebrate its birthday, the British imprint of the world's largest publishing house is releasing a new series of 80 books, entitled Little Black Classics, to be sold for just $1 each on Kindle and as paperbacks.

To introduce Little Black Classics, freelance designer Mathieu Triay created a clever and addictive interactive website. It's designed like a black-and-white wheel of fortune. Drag a little penguin around the 80 notches of the circle to explore the series' titles and quotes from each book

Penguin UK launches one of its most ambitious projects ever this week in which it effectively aims to crowd source the future of the book. On Thursday it will release a chunk of free, cross media content from Stephen Fry's new volume of memoirs More Fool Me - as well as material from the earlier Fry Chronicles - and will actively invite creative disobedience, digital play, tech mash-ups and all kinds of online mayhem on a global scale. 

In 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, America's book publishers took an audacious gamble. They decided to sell the armed forces cheap paperbacks, shipped to units scattered around the globe. Instead of printing only the books soldiers and sailors actually wanted to read, though, publishers decided to send them the best they had to offer. Over the next four years, publishers gave away 122,951,031 copies of their most valuable titles.

Penguin Random House announced a substantial change to the organization and management of its U.S. adult publishing divisions in three separate letters to PRH staff today. The letters detailed the creation of the Penguin Publishing Group, a unified adult publishing division that merges PRH's Berkley/NAL and Penguin Adult.

Grandinetti believes the publishing industry has failed to recognise fundamental shifts in its business. Part of Amazon's mission, then, has been to jolt an often sleepy industry with revolutionary, customer-focused retailing zeal. The real competition, he believes, is not rival publications or publishers but the entire array of information and entertainment, free or otherwise, available to consumers. "Books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more," he says.

In the books world, publishers Penguin have capitalised on the fact that - according to a survey - 37% of people who aren't interested in the World Cup turn to books to escape. They've cheekily launched their very own Penguin Cup: 16 teams, all formed by each country's all-time literary stars.

England's XI look great, especially after their real-life big defeat against Uruguay (though sadly it's impossible to size up the literary competition as there is no entry for the Latin American country):