Google Play Posts

Scholastic Corporation Rings the Nasdaq Stock Market Opening Bell

On 14 February 2018 to coincide with the birthday of beloved children’s character Clifford, Scholastic Corporation Rang the Nasdaq Stock Market Opening Bell .

[Here is the text from the press release]

Scholastic Corporation (Nasdaq: SCHL), the global children’s publishing, education and media company, will visit the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square on Valentine’s Day in honor of Clifford The Big Red Dog’s birthday.

Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic, will be joined by the beloved literary icon Clifford as well as Scholastic employees with their children to ring the Opening Bell. For more than 55 years, Clifford has added joy to the lives of millions of children and has grown from a bestselling book series by the late, great Norman Bridwell into an iconic global brand. Today, there are more than 130 million Clifford books in print – plus a Clifford television series (currently on Netflix and through iTunes and Google Play), toys, games, ebooks, and interactive products, so that children can interact with Clifford wherever and whenever they like.

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Scholastic India have a large presence locally too.

15 February 2018 

Bookaroo app is launched!

Bookaroo, the Children’s Literature Festival organised by Swati Roy, Venkatesh Swamy and Jo Williams is in the tenth year of its existence. From the first edition the festival has blossomed into a travelling festival including going overseas to Malaysia as Pustaka Bookaroo.
In addition to the main weekend festivals, there is an outreach programme, Bookaroo in the City, which takes writers, illustrators, storytellers and poets to mainstream schools and special purpose institutions for children. In short, anything, anywhere, anytime to spread the joy of reading.

Earlier this year they won the International Excellence Awards at the London Book Fair 2017, the first children’s literature festival ever to get the honour. Now the festival organisers have launched the Bookaroo app that is available on Google Play. The immediate purpose is to make their programming available easily for everyone instead of sharing large spreadsheets.

Here is a short interview with the organisers about the app.

  1. Why did you decide to launch an app? The basic purpose of the app is to make the programme (session details) easily accessible without having to download heavy pdf files. Moreover, it is part of our efforts to reduce use of paper. In the future, we would like to be paperless.
  2. How often will you update it? – Just before every edition
  3. What is the kind of information you will capture from the data collected via the app? Why is it necessary for the app to seek permission to access the user’s phone camera and other databases? Why not restrict access to GPR alone? Most apps come with these permission requirements. We will look at data for internal analysis.
  4. Will the data analysis help in tweaking the Bookaroo programmes in future? – We have been constantly evolving the programme taking into account all the feedback that we receive. The app will simply be another avenue.
  5. Will it be available in different languages? –Yes it will, in the future.
  6. Would you ever slowly expand it to include interviews, maybe book excerpts to an online bookstore? The app is in beta mode just now. We will be looking into all the options, possibilities as we develop it.
  7. Will it remain a free app? – Yes – we hope so.
  8. Will it be available on the iOS platform as well?  – Yes, in October
  9. Who is the target audience? Adults  or children?   We are targeting all those who are interested in children’s literature.

30 August 2017 

 

To Kill A Mockingbird published as an ebook for the first time

To Kill A Mockingbird published as an ebook for the first time

Harper LeeRandom House is delighted to announce that 54 years after it was first published Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbirdwill be released as an ebook today for the first time.

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been translated into more than 40 languages, and sells well over 1 million copies each year worldwide. Now, for the first time, To Kill a Mockingbird will be available as a straight text ebook, an enhanced ebook with extra exclusive content, and a digital audio, narrated by Oscar-winning actress Sissy Spacek.

‘I am amazed and humbled that Mockingbird has survived this long,’ said Nelle Harper Lee. ‘I’m still old fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. This is Mockingbird for a new generation.’

The ebook is available with all ebook retailers including Flipkart, Amazon, Google Play and Kobo.

8 July 2014 

Caroline Newbury

VP Marketing and Corporate Communications

Random House India

Penguin Random House

 

7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C

DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

+91 124 4785600

+ 91 124 4785606

[email protected]

www.randomhouse.co.in

On “discoverability” in publishing. (PubSpeak, BusinessWorld, Aug 2013)

On “discoverability” in publishing. (PubSpeak, BusinessWorld, Aug 2013)

PubSpeak, Jaya

( My monthly column, “PubSpeak”, in BusinessWorld online. July 2013 is on “discoverability”. Here is the link to the orignial url http://www.businessworld.in/en/storypage/-/bw/publishers-search-tools-to-find-readers/r1013160.37528/page/0 )

Publishers’ Search Tools To Find Readers

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose on why it is the discovery of a book that ultimately matters for the business of publishing

How does a reader ‘discover’ an author/book? Today digital technology is rapidly becoming a unifying factor in the coming together of print and electronic forms of publishing. It is also responsible for the “discoverability” of a book. Traditional forms of discovery – curation in a brick-and-mortar bookstore, word-of-mouth recommendations, libraries, second hand bookstores, gifts, book reviews in newspapers and magazines and book clubs continue to be significant. Literary prizes too are important.

Chinaman
Caroline Newbury, VP Marketing and Publicity, Random House Publishers India explains the link well with reference to their author, Shehan Karunatilaka winning the DSC prize worth $50,000 in 2012 for his book Chinaman. “Any prize which supports both new and established writers is to be praised but the DSC Prize is a special case for its specific promotion of writing about South Asia,” says Newbury. “Since its DSC Prize win we have reprinted Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman and its prize-winning credentials definitely help bring it to a wider readership in India and beyond.”

Yet it is the popular modes of discovering a book including online reading communities like Goodreads and Riffles; advertisement banners in e-mails and on websites; automatic recommendations on online retail sites like Amazon, Flipkart; conversations and status updates in social media spaces such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest; following literary curators; bloggers; and even movie adaptations of a book.

50 Writers
Two books that I read recently – 50 Writers, 50 books: The Best of Indian Fiction and Reading New India: Post-millennial Indian Fiction in English, apart from being thought-provoking commentaries on literature, are a good way of discovering authors. The first is an anthology of essays discussing books from Indian fiction, across languages and the second a critique with a synopsis of the stories of predominantly commercial fiction. The texts complement each other well, but for a reader they are valuable for discovering fiction hitherto they have unheard of, especially since the fiction discussed is recommended by academics, authors, critics and literary tastemakers.
reading-new-india-post-millennial-indian-fiction-in-english

It is important to delineate the thin line between discoverability and promotion of a book. Discoverability would depend largely upon the gravitas of the book, the whispers that are heard about a book in various contexts. But promotions would be the marketing blitzkrieg created by the publishing houses. These could include the predictable book launches, panel discussions, and author tours, interviews in the prominent newspapers and participating in literary festivals. Now add to that list partnerships with coffee chains. Authors too are beginning to hire PR firms and consultants to strategise and create a media buzz for their books.

Last week two publishing professionals – Jonathan Galassi, head of Farrar, Straus & Giroux (http://www.vulture.com/2013/07/farrar-straus-giroux-jonathan-galassi-on-hothouse.html) and Anakana Schofield, debut novelist ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jul/25/anakana-schofield-how-to-write ) – raised the fundamental question about the meteoric rise in the number of writers, but where are the readers? It seems that for the first time in publishing, there are more writers than readers. It should be considered as a happy trend. More to publish, more to sell. But are there any takers? Or more importantly, how do you discover a book you want to read so that you will buy?

On 1 July 2013 Penguin and Random House announced that their merger had been approved. From 2014, the merged entity Penguin Random House is expected to be publishing 15,000 titles a year. Assuming these are all new titles of the front list, it will be a formidable stable of authors. But at the rate of publishing 41 books a day will only make it tougher to locate a title.

And if this is the scenario in English-language trade publishing how does the rest of publishing fare? Some of the other categories to be considered would be trade lists in other languages, translations, children’s literature, non-fiction, and of course academic publishing. All kinds of authors are struggling to be heard/ read.

And this conundrum of discovering an author or a relevant text extends beyond trade publishing to academic publishing too. Last week The Bookseller, a publishing industry daily, announced that “Google is to bring a textbook sale and rental service to the Google Play store this August in time for the Back to School season. The company announced it had partnered with academic publishers Pearson, Wiley, Macmillan, McGraw Hill and Cengage Google Play will offer textbook rentals and sales for up to an 80 per cent discount, the company has said, which is the same claim Amazon makes for its Kindle textbook rentals.”

This is similar to the CourseSmart model provides eTextbooks and digital course materials. It was founded in 2007 by publishers in higher education including Pearson, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group (Macmillan) and John Wiley & Sons. According to research firm Outsell Inc Online products accounted for 27 per cent of the $12.4 billion spent on textbooks for secondary schools and colleges in the US last year. Publishers like Pearson Plc and McGraw-Hill Education are also creating online versions of their texts, often loaded with interactive features, and selling students access codes that expire at semester’s end.

These alternative methods of discovering an author may be worth exploring. It is probably “easier” to experiment with dedicated platforms for textbooks where the selling price of a title is exorbitant. So, offering short-term licences (“access codes”) to academics and students to review, rent and (in moderation) print relevant pages creates a wider community of users.

Plus, it is increasingly becoming an important alternative source of revenue generation for publishing firms, although reservations exist about the adoption of a digital format by students, indications are that students prefer books. Whereas for trade publishers investing in platforms will be economically unviable unless you are Penguin and create Book Country. But for most others it will be an expensive proposition unless they opt for digital catalogues. Hence an online, interactive, cross-publisher catalogue service that supplements or replaces traditional hard-copy publisher catalogues like Edelweiss, whose tag line is “Finding your next favourite book is a lot easier”. As marketing executives say books are a low-cost product so media copies are distributed but it is the discovery of a book that ultimately matters for the business of publishing.

Jaya Bhattacharji Rose is an international publishing consultant and columnist
@JBhattacharji

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