Revenue

This week IMS Global released the 2014 Learning Impact Report which summarizes trends we are seeing in the ed tech sector based on the current year and historical winners of IMS's annual Learning Impact competition. Many thanks to those that participated in the competition from around the world and, of course, the evaluators and editorial panel! Ed tech researchers or leaders interested in helping with the Learning Impact work in the future please contact us!

Publishing conglomerates Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster are facing tough times this quarter as ebook sales fell and total profit dropped 5.6% at S&S and approximately 12% for RPH. The potential culprits? A lack of blockbuster books and low ebook sales. While ebooks sales are still dwarfed by paperback and hardback sales, publishers are now seeing even less revenue from their recently repriced bits. Now that many ebooks are selling well above the $9.99 price that was common early in the Kindle days.

March 2 is Dr. Seuss's birthday, or, rather, the day 111 years ago when Theodor Seuss Geisel, the famous children's author, was born, and for years, thousands of schools around the country have celebrated the day with book readings ("Cat in the Hat, "Green Eggs and Ham," etc.) and Seuss character costumes. This year, some of those celebrations have been changed. Why? It's the start of the spring 2015 testing season, and at many schools students will be taking PARCC Core standardized tests instead.

A former vice president at Borders Group Inc., the onetime book giant that went out of business in 2011, is convinced there is money to be made from the book industry and has been meeting with angel and venture capital investors to help launch his startup company, ContentOro LLC. Bob Chunn, who has incubator space at Ann Arbor Spark, wants to license book content from publishers and sell it to websites in need of content. At least one local veteran entrepreneur, Chuck Newman, who founded ReCellular Inc., an Ann Arbor-based company that recycles cellphones, has bought into Chunn's vision, literally, as his first investor. 

You've heard it before: music criticism as we know it is dying, replaced witheditorial positions at Apple or lifestyle reporters masquerading as music journalists. But in one tiny corner of the publishing industry, at least one form of writing about music is surviving -- even thriving. For over a decade, Bloomsbury Publishing's 33 1/3 book series has been breathing life back into liner notes with 160-page, 4x6-in. treatises on an eclectic spectrum of 104 albums, from a nuanced account of recording Neil Young's Harvest to John Darnielle of theMountain Goats' novella about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. 

Indian publishing is always in the news. It could be a mega litfest or a bestselling author whom the intelligentsia sneers at; it could be a book sought to be banned, an author who gives up writing unable to thwart the right wing loonies at his door, or even the biggest book fair in the Third World, in New Delhi, which ended on February 22.

No transparency
Yet, much of the book industry in India is make-believe and hype. Publishers operate behind a wall of secrecy and books are mostly sold by generating buzz

McGraw-Hill Education, the learning science company, has recently announced its partnership with Cerego to strengthen is adaptive learning experience for the K-12 world languages market.

McGraw-Hill Education said that the essential memory management tool will help them deepen the learning experience for K-12 students studying world languages.

McGraw-Hill Education said that they were thrilled to collaborate with Cerego as the company has already proven their expertise in the field of language learning.

Publishers are playing literary agents at their own game, seeking out new talent for themselves and cutting out the industry's powerful middlemen.

Executives within HarperCollins, Jonathan Cape, Little, Brown, and Tinder Press are inviting "un-agented submissions", marking a dramatic cultural shift for an industry having to readjust to developments such as self-publishing, as well as the often huge advances demanded by agents for coveted titles.

Next month Tinder Press, Headline publishing group's literary imprint with authors such as Andrea Levy and Patrick Gale, is holding an "open submission" fortnight.

Harvard University Press, the publisher of the Loeb Classical Library designed to make Greek and Roman classics available for general readers hopes to do the same for classical Indian literature with the launch of The Murty Classical Library of India.

As Jennifer Schuesslerjan reported in the New York Times, the first five dual language volumes that have been released include "not only Sanskrit texts but also works in Bangla, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Persian, Prakrit, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and other languages. Projected to reach some 500 books over the next century

When Harper Lee's "Go Set a Watchman" hits bookstores in July, it will face sales competition from another long-lost manuscript by a beloved author: Dr. Seuss.

Random House has announced the publication on July 28 of "What Pet Should I Get?," the story of a brother and sister searching for the newest member of the family. The manuscript had been in a box that was discovered in the home of Dr. Seuss (otherwise known as Theodore Geisel) in the La Jolla section of San Diego, shortly after his death in 1991, and set aside.