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Study: Audiobooks help reading skills| SAN DIEGO, California, December 31, 2003 -- Pupils who need help with reading can get a big boost if audiobooks are used to supplement their reading, according to a study sponsored by audiobook producer Recorded Books. In the study, with 80 eighth-graders, those whose reading was accompanied by a professionally narrated audiobook gained 31.9 words a minute in reading fluency after six weeks, the company said. A control group without the audio supplement gained 20.4. David Berset, president of Recorded Books, said the study points to audiobooks as a "potentially high payback investment" to improve reading skills. The study was conducted in a six-week project at the Samuel Gompers School in San Diego. |
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Expert: Bundle defections hurt Elsevier| NEW YORK, December 30, 2003 -- The decision of Reed Elsevier to compromise on its strict bundling and pricing for ScienceDirect subscriptions is a response to growing marketplace objections to recent price increases for the package of 1,200 academic journals, according to analyst Chuck Richard of Outsell, which tracks the information-provider industry. Richard said cancellations to ScienceDirect will hardly doom the practice of bundling but that Elsevier revenues have been hurt. Libraries are preferring to go "a la carte," he said, picking and choosing Elsevier titles even though they cost more individually. The whole bundle contains some journals with small library traffic. |
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Cuban leader faults U.S. librarian group| NEW YORK, December 29, 2003 -- The co-chair of Friends of Cuban Libraries, Robert Kent. said an " extremist minority" in the American Library Association wants the association to remain silent on the Cuban suppression of unofficial libraries. Kent said that ALA's leadership must "wake up and reject the extremists' whitewashing of the Cuban government's outrageous policy of jailing librarians and burning library books." Kent said that Cuba has the only government in the world that throws people in jail for the "crime" of opening uncensored libraries. In a slap at the ALA, Kent said: "Few people realize that the foreign policy of the venerable American Library Association, once a principled supporter of intellectual freedom, has been taken over by extremists who deny that any censorship or repression exists in Cuba, where the government is imprisoning people for opening uncensored libraries. Books that have been burned, he said, include reports by Human Rights Watch, biographies of Martin Luther King, copies of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and textbooks and other books. Cuba's jailed volunteer librarians have been adopted as Prisoners of Conscience by Amnesty International, which is demanding their immediate release, he noted. |
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Michael B. Chesson. "Myths, Guesses and Confusion Wrapped in a Beautiful Package," Textbook Letter (September-October 2000). Pages 1-5. Chesson, a Civil War historian, faults the 2000 edition of The American Nation, a Prentice Hall high school textbook, as glossy but bedeviled by inexactness, superficiality, errors and confusion. He offers a page-by-page critique of the Civil War chapter.
Peter J. Dougherty. "Science Can Help Cure University Presses," Chronicle of Higher Education (December 12, 2003). Pages B10-B11. Dougherty, a group publisher at Princeton University Press, says the humanities control U.S. university presses to the exclusion of the sciences, which he observes doesn't make economic or social sense. "Why do books in knot theory and computational biology come predominantly out of Amsterdam and Heidelberg, but not from American campuses?"
Tom VanCourt. "Less Is Better, But It Still Isn't Good," Textbook Letter (September-October 200). Pages 15-16. VanCourt, a software engineering professor, follows up his reviews of earlier editions of Glencoe Pre-Algebra: An Integrated Transtion to Algebra and Geometry, and concludes, despite improvements, that the 2001 edition is unsuitable. Distracting, unworkable Internet activities and art have been exorcised, he says, but the book remains "a mad whirl of poorly connected topics." Some is ponderous, some dumbed-down, he says. "A manual of fuzz," he calls it.
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SEC decides Messier's media finale| WASHINGTON, December 23, 2003 -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and former media chief executive Jean-Marie Messier came to an agreement in the agency's fraud investigation. Messier accepted a US$1 million fine and gave up a US$23.4 million golden parachute deal from the French conglomerate Vivendi that he built. Also, Messier agreed not to be an officer of any publicly traded U.S. company for 10 years. SEC's chief investigator, David Nelson, said Messier and his chief financial officer, Guillaume Hannezo, had failed over a 1-1/2-year period to keep Vivendi shareholders informed of growing liquidity problems. Nelson called the fraud "a complex scheme." Hannezo accepted a five-year ban on any officer role in publicly traded U.S. companies. Vivendi itself will compensate shareholders a total of US$50 million. As typical in such settlements, there was no admission of guilt. Vivendi, whose interests included U.S. book publisher Houghton Mifflin, had been France's third most valuable company until Messier's acquisition-through-borrowing strategy imploded in July 2002. |
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|  VIVENDI
MESSIER
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Colleges adding shelf space| NEW YORK, December 23, 2003 -- Colleges are building new libraries and expanding existing ones to add shelf space despite predictions that books would become extinct in the digital age. The Council on Library and Information Resources issued a report that that college libraries are adding about three million square feet a year nationwide. For the past decade, expenditures have been about $450 million a year, the report said. |
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ScienceDirect tries custom unbundling| NEW YORK, December 22, 2003 -- Journal publisher Reed Elsevier is cutting deals with college libraries that are canceling its 1,200-title ScienceDirect bundle, spokesperson Marike Westra confirmed. "Elsevier is aware of the serious financial constraints faced by some of our customers," Westra said in response to a query from the Chronicle of Higher Education. "We are addressing those of a case-by-case basis. Options include subscriptions to parts of ScienceDirect package, although, reportedly, not at the discount of the whole product. There has been growing negative reaction to Elsevier price hikes for Science Direct, exacerbated by college financial problems. At Cornell, which was being charged $1.7 million for the bundle, the decision was made to drop the least-used titles, about one-fifth of the total. The University of Missouri ended its subscription. Iowa is toying with backing out of the whole package. The North Carolina State faculty has condemned bundling. |
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| ACADEMIC AUTHORING PEOPLE |
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| Raymond P. Fisk (business), University of New Orleans, Stephen J. Grove (business), Clemson University, and Joby John (business), Bentley College, wrote the second edition of Interactive Services Marketing (Houghton Mifflin). |
| Mark Fortier, of the Goldberg, McDuffie Business division, was named a partner. Earlier he was with Columbia University Press, George Braziller Inc., and Penguin's Dutton and Plume imprints. |
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| Kate Gillespie (business), University of Texas at Austin, Jean-Pierre Jeannet (business), Babson College and International Institute for Management Development, Switzerland, and H. David Hennessey (business), Babson College and Ashridge Management College, United Kingdom wrote Global Marketing: An Interactive Approach (Houghton Mifflin). |
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Please
tell
us
about
your
latest
project:
EDITOR |
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Pearson college sales up but not much| NEW YORK, December 21, 2003 -- In a report to shareholders Pearson Education said its expects its 2003 school business to be "a little ahead" last year. Higher-ed sales are projected 5 to 7 percent ahead of 2002. For 2004 an increase of 4 to 6 percent if projected. |
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EDUCATION |
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Publishers set up indie award| WASHINGTON, December 20, 2003 -- The Association of American Publishers created an award to honor an individual who has made a creative and innovative contribution in independent publishing. The award bears the name of Miriam Bass, who died last year after a publishing career that spanned more than a quarter-century. Bass was the marketing vice president at NBN. The award carries a $5,000 cash prize, funded by the Rowman & Littlefield and NBN. |
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Wiley sites take 4 million hits a month| HOBOKEN, New Jersey, December 19, 2003 -- Textbook publisher Wiley said its Edugen e-learning content-delivery platform is in use at 40 colleges and is averaging 4 million hits a month. Five new courses have been added in recent months. The web data were in a quarterly report, in which Wiley said higher-ed sales for the second quater were ahead 6 percent from a year earlier and ahead 7 percent for the year. Wiley said engineering sales were weak but gains were scored with accounting, business, science and social science titles. Journal sales were flat domestically and down abroad. For the fiscal year, chief executive William Pece said evenue will probably be up 4 to 6 percent and earnings in "the mid to high single-digits" if market conditions continue their gradual inmprovement. |
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Eire: Jailed librarians need support| NEW YORK, December 18, 2003 -- The winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire, called on the American Library Association to condemn the Cuban government's crackdown on the island's pioneering independent library movement. Eire said the association should "openly and unconditionally censure the repression of human rights in Cuba and to do so immediately and in the strongest possible terms." The issue is on the agenda of ALA's January conference in San Diego. Since 1998 approximately 200 independent, uncensored libraries have opened in Cuba "as part of an innovative challenge to government control of information," Eire, a historian and religion scholar at Yale University, said that volunteer librarians have been sentenced up to 26 years in prison after one-day trials. The government has confiscated their books and called the librarians "counterrevolutionaries." |
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| Varsity Books: Sales grew 49 percent in the third quarter to $21.5 million, compared to a year earlier. Net income grew 78 percent to $14.4 million.
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| Wiley: Revenue grew 4 percent to $448.5 million for the second quarter, compared to a year earlier. Net income grew 7 percent to $21.8 million. College sales were up 6 percent.
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Elsevier health courses going online| LONDON, December 17, 2003 -- Textbook and journal publisher Reed Elsevier will make its supplementarty materials available to adopters of its health textbooks through the eCollege system. The Elsevier product is called Evolve Online Courses. |
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Von Hoffmann shutters transparency plant| ST. LOUIS, Missouri, December 16, 2003 -- To increase efficiencies, textbook printer Von Hoffmann will close its Precision Offset Printing unit in Leesport and Dauberville, Pennsylvania, where printing is done on plastic inserts and transparencies for tetxbooks. About 110 employees are being laid off or relocated. Von Hoffmann said that Precision Offset projects will be absorbed by its Lehigh Press unit in Pennsauken, New Jersey. Plastics printing is a $17 million annual revenue source for Von Hoffmann. |
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Harcourt Assessments buys Swets Test| LONDON, December 15, 2003 -- Dutch psychology publisher Swets Test International is being purchased by Harcourt Assessments of London. Terms were not announced. Swets, a unit of Swets & Zeitlinger, has strong lists in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands and Germany. Besides psychology, the Swets unit publishes in human resource management, health care and education. The company also publishes tests. Swets will be incorportaed into Harcourt Assessments, which was known as Psychological Corporatiuon until its acquisition by Reed Elsevier in 2002. |
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| REED
ELSEVIER
HARCOURT
ASSESSMENT
SWETS
TEST |
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Delmar acquiring Aspen chem manuals| NEW YORK, December 14, 2003 -- College and medical publisher Delmar is buying the subscription-only Aspen Clinical Manuals. Details are being worked out, said Delmar and Aspen-owner Wolters Kluwer in a joint announcement. Terms were not announced. Delmar, a unit of Thomson Learning, said it will make Aspen manuals available in digial formats. |
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More copyshop infringement suits filed| DANVERS, Massachusetts, December 13, 2003 -- The Copyright Clearance Center, whose service include pernmissions for coursepack producers, sued copyshops in San Francisco, California, and Katy, Texas. CCC says that Medical Review Services, of Katy, and LMS Information Services, of San Francisco, drew on copyright-protected articles in producing coursepacks for corporate customers. In an announcement, CCC said the cases illustrate "the acceleration of copyright infringement enabled by digital tehnology." The suits, in federal court, were filed on behalf of five scientific, medical and technical publishers: American Chemical Society, Elsevier, Marcel Dekker, Sage, and Wiley. |
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Quebecor continues scaling back| GREENWICH, Connecticut, December 12, 2003 -- In a sign of weakness in the book industry, the international printing company Quebcor is closing its United States heaquarters in Greenwich. Many of the 50 employees are being relocated. Over the past three years Quebecor, which is based in Canada, has closed 15 plants and laid off about 500 people, about 10 perceny of its workforce. |
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Search engine lowers coursepacks to $5| SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 11, 2003 -- Coursepacks can be created for less than $5 with a new online search engine being pormoted by the U.S. Distance Learning Association. Coursepacks currently are in the $25 to $70 range. The search engine, called the Learner's Library, scans more than 500 major academic journals for full-text entries as well as news sources. Permissions are all pre-cleared and paid, the association said. |
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Houghton buying Edusoft| SAN FRANCISCO, California, December 10, 2003 -- The software company Edusoft, which has devised classroom management software for teachers to track pupil performance on stste standards, is being sold to publishing giant Houghton Mifflin. The companies announced a preliminary agreement but did not disclose terms. Edusoft, which has 70 employees, claims contracts worth $17 million with 200 school districts. |
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HOUGHTON
MIFFLIN
EDUSOFT |
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Rigby, Steck-Vaughn now one| AUSTIN, Texas, December 9, 2003 -- The editorial office of Rigby, now a unit of Harcourt Supplemental, has been relocated to Austin and is being integrated into Harcourt's Steck-Vaughn facilities. Earlier Harcourt moved Rigby's marketing and administrative operations to Austin. Some of Rigby's 70 editorial employees in Barrington, Illinois, including the vice president and managing editor, Laura Strom, made the move. Although the Rigby and Steck-Vaughn integration is now complete, Rick Blake, vice president for communication, said the imprints will retain their separate marketing identities. |
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HARCOURT
SUPPLE
MENTAL
RIGBY
STECK-
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Hentoff condemns Cuban suppression| WASHINGTON, December 8, 2003 -- Libertarian crusader Nat Hentoff, writing in the Washington Times, called on authors to shame the American Library Association to speak up for "extraordinarily courageous Cuban librarians, who, under a dictatorship, advocate, to their own great peril, the same right to read freely that we Americans enjoy." Hentoff called for messages to the ALA before its midwinter meeting, which begins Jan. 9 in San Diego, "to rescind the shameful silence of the ALA." The association's Intellectural Freedom Committee has backed off condemning book confiscations and librarian jailings in Cuba. Referring to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Hentoff said: "Mr. Ashcroft has put none of the [ALA] delegates to San Diego in prison; and it takes no courage -- only self-respect -- for them to insist on the freedom of those librarians in Cuba who may not be 'professional' librarians. But they certainly are the very exemplars of the ALA's purported dedication to everyone's freedom to read -- and freedom of conscience." |
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October book sales hardly robustWASHINGTON, December 7, 2003 -- Sales of books in the genres in which academic authors write were gloomy in October, compared to a year earlier, according to the latest data compiled by the Association of American Publishers. The slump slowed improvements in the AAP's monthly year-to-date data. Through October these are the latest 2003 data, as extrapolated from 92 reporting publishers:
University press (hard)
University press (soft)
El-hi
College
Professional, scholarly | 13.8%
9.4%
2.4%
1.6%
-1.3% |
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Chicago Review buys Zephyr| TUCSON, Arizona, December 6, 2003 -- Educational publisher Zephyr Press of Tucson, which specializes in materials for gifted children, was purchased by Chicago Review Press and distributor Independent Publishers Group. Terms were not announced. Chicago Review specializes in activity-oriented children's books, which Chicago Review's chief executive, Curt Matthews, said makes Zephyr a good fit. Matthews said he expects to issue about 12 titles a year under the Zephyr imprint, plus Chicago Review's recent 50 titles a year. Zephyr has a 150-title backlist. |
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Louisiana College defends text screening| PINEVILLE, Louisiana, December 5, 2003 -- The chair of the academics commitee of the Louisiana College board of trustees, Fred A. Malone, said the Christian values espoused by the college cannot always coincide with the values of academic freedom. In an inteview about new rules requiring adminstrative aproval of textbooks, Malone said: "Academic freedom cannot be absolute in a Christian-college context." The trustees' goal with the new textbook approval requirement, he said, is to assure that Louisiana College "functions in harmony" with religious precepts set forth in the Baptist Faith and Message adopted by Baptist organizations nationwide in 2000. Malone said the policy puts textbook selection in the hands of "more experienced" department heads to assure "proper balance between academic freedom and academic responsibility." The approval process also involves the academic vice president. |
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| David K. Eiteman (finance), University of California-Los Angeles, Arthur I. Stonehill (finance), University of Hawaii-Manoa, and Michael H. Moffett (finance), Thunderbird American School of International Management, wrote the 10th edition of Multinational Business Finance (Addison Wesley). |
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| Charles W. L. Hill (business), University of Washington, and Gareth R. Jones,Texas A&M University, wrote the sixth edition of Cases in Strategic Management (Houghton Mifflin). |
| Hallett Johnson III, earlier with Time-Life Books and Oxmoor Press, was named chief marketing officer at Harvard Business School Publishing. |
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| Michael Melvin (finance), Arizona State University, wrote the seventh edition of International Money and Finance (Addison Wesley). |
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Please
tell
us
about
your
latest
project:
EDITOR |
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CCC adds Ex Libris, XanEdu access| DANVERS, Massachusetts, December 4, 2003 -- Content from library software provider Ex Libris, and online college course-material publisher XanEdu will be available for purchase through the Copyright Clearance Center under a new agreement. The CCC collects licensing fess, which then are passed on to publishers, aiuthors and other rightsholders, less a commission. The agreement improves "ease and likelihood of copyright compliance by providing new points of access at which application users can obtain the permission they need," CCC said. The work of researchers and other information users, as well as make it easier for users of content to comply with copyright law, CCC said. |
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Louisiana College faulted for screening | WASHINGTON, December 3, 2003 -- A decision by Louisana College trustees to screen professor-chosen reading assigments for their classes is ripe with academic freedom issues, according to an official with the American Association of University Professors. "Establishing such a policy is basically inconsistent with generally accepted principles," said B. Robert Kreiser, a senior AAUP program officer quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Constraining professors in their textbook choices "seems to be in contravention to the professed commitment to academic freedom," he said. The college's trustees are requiring books be screened for inappropriate content by department chairs and the academic vice president. The policy resulted from profane language and a love scene in books assigned in a philosophy and a religion class. |
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LITTLE HOUSES
IN COLLEGE PUBLISHING
Even in this age of most textbook publishing consolidated in a few mega-corporations, smaller educational publishers can compete. Their success depends on developing excellent products, precisely targeting the right customers, and underselling the giants. Examples abound, including TeachingPoint, Larson Texts, and Alexander Publications.
HER COMPLETE COLUMN |
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LEPIONKA |
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Econ book aims to transform publishing| PRINCETON, New Jersey, December 2, 2003 -- Economist Paul Krugman, dubious about the future of the traditional textbook publishing model, is optimistic about the two-medium model of his new Economics, which will be issued as both an online and a printed text by Worth in a few weeks. "The current model will be less and less viable," he said, referring to problems posed by escalating prices, used-book options for students, and, now, transborder sales. "This is an attempt to get ahead of the curve," Krugman said. The 800-page hardback version, with co-author Paul Romer, will sell for $100 through normal retail channels. An online version, at $60, will discourage students from the used-book alternative. It also will undercut the growing trend of students going to web sites to buy versions that publishers sell for less abroad. The online version includes teaching software and lessons developed by Paul Romer. With the online version, professors will be able to tell if students are reading. Also, the software will automatically grade assignments. |
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THE AUTHORS
Paul Krugman
Princeton
International Economics / 6e
The Great Unraveling
Robin Wells
Princeton
Paul Romer
Aplia
International Economics / 6e |
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| ACADEMIC AUTHORING PEOPLE |
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| Wayne D. Hoyer (business), University of Texas, Austin, and Deborah J. MacInnis (business), University of Southern California, wrote the third edition of Consumer Behavior (Houghton Mifflin).
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| Wayne David C. Howell (statistics), University of Vermont, wrote the fifth edition of Fundamental Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (Brooks/Cole). |
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| Jeff Madura (finance), Florida Atlantic University, wrote the second edition of Personal Finance (Addison-Wesley).
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Please
tell
us
about
your
latest
project:
EDITOR |
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Thomson leads with 43,000 employeesDARIEN, Connecticut, December 1, 2003 -- By far the largest educational publisher when measured by the umber of employees is Thomson, according to the book industry newsletter Subtext. The numbers, for Fiscal 2003, include employees both in educational publishing and other enterprises. The ranking, with figures rounded:Thomson
Reed Elsevier
Wolters Kluwer
McGraw-Hill
Pearson Education
Scholastic
Houghton Mifflin
John Wiley & Sons
WRC Media |
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| 43,000
36,100
20,000
16,500
12,600
9,900
3,600
3,400
900 |
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DATA BANK INDEX
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