Harcourt Education

Atlanta - International Society for Technology in Education Conference - Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) today unveiled HMH Player, a new app that tackles the major pain points faced by educators as they integrate technology into the classroom. The app enables offline access to quality content, allows teachers and students to collaborate in real time, and offers the opportunity to enhance HMH content through extensive customization tools.

Global education leader Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) has acquired Curiosityville - an online personalized learning environment that helps children ages 3-8 learn through playful exploration and discovery.  The acquisition will be a core element of HMH's early childhood education offering, which represents a significant growth area for the Company.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has had a decent reception in its return to the public markets, with a solid gain since its November 2013 initial public offering. The company was a victim of the changes sweeping the book-publishing business, including a shift to digital distribution delivered via e-readers and tablets, which has generally led to lower product pricing and profit compression for publishers. After a trip through bankruptcy court in 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has reemerged more focused and lighter, having rid itself of close to $3 billion in debt. So, is it a worthwhile play for investors?

Brook Colangelo has already made his digital mark. As the former CIO of the Executive Office of the President (EOP) for the Obama administration, he pursued open source website-development projects for the WhiteHouse.gov site, ushered in mobile devices while ushering out desktop computers with floppy discs, and embarked on such crowdsourcing experiments as We the People. Colangelo, 35, also shook up the culture in another way: He leveraged the benefits of an Agile methodology to make sure these innovations happened fast. That adds up to some serious CIO street cred…

Houghton Mifflin Co., a leading educational publisher, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire the Harcourt Education, Harcourt Trade and Greenwood Heinemann divisions of Reed Elsevier. Houghton Mifflin will acquire the Harcourt businesses for $4 billion, which will consist of $3.7 billion in cash and $300 million in common stock of Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group PLC. “When Reed Elsevier announced its intention to sell the Harcourt businesses, we were thrilled to have the opportunity to combine these businesses,” said Barry O’Callaghan, the principal shareholder of Houghton Mifflin. “The addition of the Harcourt businesses to Houghton Mifflin will strengthen our position

Reed Elsevier put its Harcourt Education unit up for for grabs to the highest bidder this week, as the company announced its plans to focus in on its other segments. Harcourt Education, which serves the Pre-K to 12th-grade assessment and trade markets, was the only Reed division to post a decline in sales last year. It saw its profits drop 20 percent in 2006. According to Reed Elseveir’s 2006 financial report released yesterday, the company said it will focus more on its science and medical, legal and business segments. The report said Harcourt’s business dynamics and strategy have increasingly differed from the other three divisions. “The planned

Textbook giant Harcourt Education, Reed Elsevier Group’s global education publishing division, named a new president and chief operating officer to head the company’s domestic business earlier this week. Lloyd G. “Buzz” Waterhouse, 54, assumed the role of president and COO, a newly created post, on Wednesday. The former CEO and chairman of The Reynolds and Reynolds Co., a software provider that provides automobile dealerships with computer software, held several management positions with IBM during his career, including its academic and education units. Waterhouse will oversee several Harcourt business units, including Harcourt School Publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Harcourt Achieve, Harcourt Trade Publishers and Greenwood-Heinemann. Buzz

Content is still king in book publishing. The challenge to publishers today is to move, manage, exchange and manipulate that content in the most efficient and profitable ways. In the age of new media, publishers must be able to accept content from external sources, traffic it through all the pre-publishing phases and then be agile in the way they output it, so that it’s cost-effective but also meaningful to readers. As with any new technology, publishers should evaluate software solutions with these basic considerations in mind: Functionality: What solutions out there have the types of capabilities your company needs? Once the field has