Scholastic Inc.

BiblioNasium, the fastest growing COPPA compliant, social reading network for young readers, is announcing the launch of new features that support multi-media content and tools for presenting stories and books to its audience of kids, their parents and educators.

Scholastic, the iconic publishing company has nearly 100 years of history promoting literacy to kids, but the digitization of the world over the last 20 years created some new challenges. With more and more kids turning towards digital media for their entertainment, Scholastic recognized in order to remain relevant and fulfill the company's mission, it would need to reach children where they were: on screens.

The preliminary program and speaker roster for the upcoming IDPF conference at BEA is now available at idpf.org/db14/. IDPF Digital Book 2014, the professional digital conference at Book Expo America, is May 28-29, 2014 at the Javits Center in New York City.

Scholastic today announced the launch of Storia® School Edition , a subscription-based ebook solution for Pre-K through Grade 6, for group and individual classroom reading, and Core Clicks^TM , a web-based instructional program for Kindergarten through Grade 5 that supports content area reading in social studies and science.

Hot on the heels of news that Oyster had signed a trio of publishers comes new reports that their competition is doing the same.

Earlier this week the kid-focused service Epic announced a deal with Capstone Young Readers to add 500 titles to Epic’s current catalog. The new additions include licensed titles from DC Entertainment, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Tony Hawk and Warner Brothers. Epic offers Netflix-style subscription access to nearly 4,000 ebooks for kinds aged 7 to 12 for $9.99 a month, and currently offers an iPad app.

"Longform" is a buzzword these days and it's generally used to refer to nonfiction works for adults. But Toronto-based illustrated storytelling platform Storybird thinks longform can work for a younger crowd, too, and this week it rolled out options that let writers serialize longer illustrated works. Until now, Storybird's two available formats were picture books and poetry.

Disney Publishing Worldwide will release four new children's books tied to the original Star Wars film trilogy, starting in October 2014. Authors Tom Angleberger (The Strange Case of Origami Yoda), Tony DiTerlizzi (The Spiderwick Chronicles), Adam Gidwitz (A Tale Dark & Grimm), and R.J. Palacio (Wonder) are reinterpreting the original Star Wars saga storylines in advance of the December 2015 release of the next Star Wars film, Episode VII.

Zoobean, one of many startups to experiment with the “Netflix for kids’ books” business model – meaning, a subscription-based children’s books service where new books arrive monthly – is today shifting to become a broader recommendations platform instead. Going forward, the company aims to become something that’s more like a “Pandora for children’s apps and books,” helpfully pointing parents to personalized content they can buy if they choose.

Children's publishing, education and media company Scholastic Corp. (SCHL: Quote) on Thursday reported a loss for the third quarter that narrowed from last year, reflecting a one-time tax benefit.

Revenues for the quarter declined 1 percent, primarily due to lower sales of the company's higher-margin educational technology products. Looking ahead, the company reiterated its financial outlook for fiscal 2014.

On Monday at an education conference in Austin, Tex., Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City public schools and the current chief executive of Amplify, the education unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, will introduce a digital English language arts curriculum for middle school.

McGraw Hill, the textbook publisher, will also announce this week that it has signed a partnership with StudySync, a company that creates digital English curriculum tools that have been deployed in 22,000 classrooms and are priced at about a third of Amplify's rate.