Random House Inc.

Penguin Random House relaunched its website yesterday, designing the new platform to drive book discovery and build community -- and perhaps most importantly, collect data. The trade publisher has listed its entire catalog on the site, complete with author pages, book recommendations, interactive games, and an ecommerce platform. It released a brief video which shared the site's new features and emphasized that it is a place where readers can come to find the books they love and discover new ones.

E-book subscription services are bulking up and expanding their libraries and services, as the competition to become the Netflix of books escalates. On Thursday, the subscription reading service Scribd announced that it would add more than 9,000 audiobooks from Penguin Random House Audio to its platform, increasing its audiobook catalog to more than 45,000 titles.

The deal will give Scribd's subscribers access to narrations of popular titles by authors like Lena Dunham, John Grisham, Gillian Flynn and George R.R. Martin.

OverDrive, the leading sales channel for eBooks, audiobooks, and other premium media to libraries and schools, announced today that library spending on children's, juvenile, and young adult eBooks in 2014 grew by 48% over 2013. Helping drive this dramatic growth was OverDrive's 2014 launch of narrated eBooks and highly-illustrated best-selling children's titles using open industry-standard EPUB3 and OverDrive Read. 

President and Publisher of Random House Children's Books, Barbara Marcus, has announced the acquisition of the Now I'm Reading product line of books from innovativeKids, a Connecticut based toy and education company.

First launched in 2001, Now I'm Reading! is a step-by-step series that guides beginning readers from their first read-along book through the self-confidence of independent reading. Since it launched, it has taught more than three million kids how to read and is said to be among the premier learn-to-read programs available today.

Penguin UK launches one of its most ambitious projects ever this week in which it effectively aims to crowd source the future of the book. On Thursday it will release a chunk of free, cross media content from Stephen Fry's new volume of memoirs More Fool Me - as well as material from the earlier Fry Chronicles - and will actively invite creative disobedience, digital play, tech mash-ups and all kinds of online mayhem on a global scale. 

Byliner's recent struggles have been well documented this summer with executives jumping ship, stalled author payments, and rumors of imminent closure. Those struggles may have come to an end for the ereading startup, which sold long-form journalism and short fiction pieces, with its recent acquisition by Vook.

Penguin Random House announced a substantial change to the organization and management of its U.S. adult publishing divisions in three separate letters to PRH staff today. The letters detailed the creation of the Penguin Publishing Group, a unified adult publishing division that merges PRH's Berkley/NAL and Penguin Adult.

When Penguin and Random House joined forces last year, the publishers brought together 10,000 jobs, 250 independent imprints, and $3.7 billion in annual revenues. The merged publisher left vague how it would handle combining two very distinct logos with long-running literary traditions.

The solution announced on Tuesday is an elegant, inclusive, and understated two-part branding system. Rather than choosing either a previous logo or trying to come up with something new, Penguin Random House will exist as a wordmark spelling out the company's name-think Coca-Cola (KO) or GE (GE)

Penguin Random House today announced the formation of a cross-company Consumer Marketing Development and Operations Group. It will both support the dedicated title-, author- and category-marketing, and the marketing innovation within each of its U.S. publishing groups

Independent booksellers are being sent reinforcements in the battle against Amazon with a website that will support the dwindling band of high street traders, backed by the world's largest publisher . My Independent Bookshop, a social network for book lovers from Penguin Random House, launches on Thursday as an online space where anyone can review their favourite books and show off their good taste on virtual shelves.

Crucially, readers can also buy books from the site, with a small proportion of takings going to support scores of local independent book stores.