Pearson Company

Book manufacturers and publishers used to squeeze each other to cut costs at the other's expense. Now they are cutting costs together in partnerships of convenience. Welcome to 2004. It's like 2003, only the recession's grip has lessened. Production managers continue to shave a penny here, save a dollar there, while keeping up hope that the vaunted recovery will hit their employer's slice of the book publishing industry soon. Meanwhile, large retail and bookstore chains are returning books by the truckload, according to industry regulars. This dilutes revenues and increases costs for the publishers, leaving them with diminished cash flow and pinched

With few electronic textbooks to choose from, cyberschools are forging ahead with efforts to develop their own courseware. Traditional textbook publishers stand to lose. New book markets are emerging on the Internet that don't require readers 18 and older. Among them: education. The explosion of 'cyberschools' (also known as 'e-schools') is revolutionizing how educational materials are manufactured and distributed. Cyberschools have been growing in size and scope since they first appeared in the late 1990s. The Distance Learning Resource Network, a non-profit agency dedicated to improving education, pegs the number of students in online classrooms between 40,000 and 50,000 for the 2002-03

Those vinyl books that make bath time so much fun for kids present a much different challenge to Nadine Britt. She is the production director at Penguin Putnam (www.penguinputnam.com) and oversees the Dutton, Grosset & Dunlap and Price Stern Sloan mass merchandise children's imprints. With 11 children's imprints and 15 adult imprints, Penguin Putnam is a division of the Penguin Group, the second-largest English-language trade book publisher in the world. Formed in 1996 as a result of the merger between Penguin Books USA and The Putnam Berkeley Group, the Penguin Group has primary operations in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and

With his slight build, round rims and British accent, Harry Potter, the international star of the children's literati, has already inspired comparisons to beloved book characters including The Little Prince and Mathilda. Magical and quirky, the Potter series is reputed to be among the bestselling publishing cross-over hits ever with 55 million prints and counting in circulation in the U.S. alone. But what sets Potter apart from the pack is not so much the creativity of J.K. Rowling, but rather, the bite that the traditional print book series takes out of the multi-media world: toys, gadgets and a Hollywood movie replete with special effects

Peer into today's kaleidescope of online booksellers By Tatyana Sinioukov Now that more and more bookstores have ".com" in their addresses, physical books are being replaced by e-books that have no spines and no pages you can turn by hand--and they aren't even made of paper. Well, everyone knows that. However, what is fascinating to witness is how both traditional and electronic publishers show great creativity in the way they sell their wares on the Web. As the listing beginning at right illustrates, the emerging business models for selling books online grow more varied and inventive by the day. An example of one company