Austin, Tex.

On Monday at an education conference in Austin, Tex., Joel Klein, the former chancellor of New York City public schools and the current chief executive of Amplify, the education unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, will introduce a digital English language arts curriculum for middle school.

McGraw Hill, the textbook publisher, will also announce this week that it has signed a partnership with StudySync, a company that creates digital English curriculum tools that have been deployed in 22,000 classrooms and are priced at about a third of Amplify's rate.

As the world turns, so does the book manufacturing industry. International affairs brought both pessimism and hope to an industry still in the throes of a sputtering global economy. On the upside: a new Harry Potter title and Hillary Clinton's memoirs have legions of readers shelling out cash at bookstores nationwide. Indeed, the Association of American Publishers, Washington, reports U.S. book sales rose 5.5% in 2002, to $27 billion—proving once again that, no matter how bad things seem, you can't keep a good book down. Or a good book manufacturer. Despite competitive market conditions, high unemployment, war in the Middle East, a dearth of

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