Clancy Marshall

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

Heather Fletcher is senior content editor with Target Marketing.

The team at Book Business recently hosted a one-day, invite-only event in NY. I had the pleasure of attending as well as moderating the first panel of the day, "Transforming Your Company for the New Era of Book Publishing."

The day was filled with highly engaging discussions featuring panelists from McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Hachette, Cengage, Perseus, Rodale, HarperCollins, and Scribd. Here are a few of the most interesting points I took away from the event:

What is our core value proposition? It's a business jargon-y type of question that the editor in me shudders to hear, but it stuck in my mind -- in a good way -- when I heard it asked this week at our Book Business Live event on March 31st. Clancy Marshall, VP of core systems at Pearson posed the question during the day's first panel which discussed transforming publishing companies in order to thrive in the digital era.

At the Book Business Live: Executive Summit on Digital Publishing, held in New York City in March, leading publishers from the trade and education sectors gathered to share insight on how they’re managing change and working to reorient their organizations. During the panel “Transforming Your Company for the New Era of Book Publishing,” speakers were asked what maneuvers their organizations are making to thrive in an era of flux.

Digital reading platform Curriculet announced last week partnerships with Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, making thousands more titles available to the over 500,000 K-12 teachers and students that use the platform. The deals ups Curriculet's library to over 30,000 ebooks.

Right around the time major news outlets were reporting on student protests regarding tuition hikes, a new kind of textbook publisher was letting scholars know that it had heard their cries for lower textbook costs. Less expensive, customized, relevant books now are available, announced DynamicBooks, a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishing.

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