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Pearson leads U.S. education housesDARIEN, Connecticut, September 30, 2004 -- Despite an expected 11 percent sales declines, British-owned Pearson Educationremained the largest publisher of textbooks in the United States in 2003, according to the latest data and estimates compiled by the trade journal Subtext. Of the top U.S. education publishers, some are more heavily in college markets, and some more in el-hi markets. Subtext said that Pearson's el-hi sales grew 2.2 percent to $2.1 billion in 2003, while college sales were flat at $1.4 billion.The unit's professional sales were off 36 percent.
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The Subtext breakdown, with numbers rounded:
Pearson Education
McGraw-Hill
Thomson
Harcourt Education
Houghton Mifflin
Scholastic
WRC Media
Wiley |
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| $ 4.4 billion
2.3 billion
2.1 billion
1.6 billion
1.1 billion
369 million
203 million
189 million |
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| -11.0 percent
0.5 percent
0.8 percent
-9.6 percent
9.0 percent
13.2 percent
-2.9 percent
7.4 percent |
The Subtext data, based partly on estimates for companies taht don't break down sales, said McGraw's el-hi sales were off 0.4 percent to $2.3 billion and college sales up 1.5 percent to $1.1 billion. Thomson, whose focus is the college market, had higher-ed sales of $1.1 billion, the rest coming from reference sales and a broad range of business and government information services. In books, Harcourt is mostly an el-hi player. Houghton's K-12 sales were up 9.7 percent to $773 million and college up 6.7 percent to $226 million.
Banned Book Week targets Patriot ActWASHINGTON, September 25, 2004 -- The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression kicked off Banned Books Week with an awareness campaign on elements of the 2001 Patriot Act that it says discourage Inquiry through reading. The foundation president, Chris Finan, said that Banned Books Week is so to celebrate the freedom to read broadly speaking. "There's no question that since the passage of the Patriot Act our focus has been on protecting the right to read privately," Finan said, noting that the Patriot Act allows government agents to check up on any citizens reading habits be secretly examining library and bookstore records.
The foundation has encouraged bookstores to show a 26-minute documentary, "Reading Your Rights," about one store's fight against a search warrant for customer records. Stores were encouraged to sponsor events with librarians, lawyers or law professors to expand on the issues raised in the film. |
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California textbook price caps OK'dSACRAMENTO, California, September 25, 2004 -- Two companion bills, one to place a cap on the price of school textbooks, have passed the California Legislature. Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, said millions of dollars would be saved if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signs the bills. The state education department now cannot legally consider price when deciding what books to adopt, but the Canciamilla bill would change that. The second bill now on Schwarzenegger's desk would allow a local school district to use state funds to adopt books that are not on the state-approved list if a district makes a strong case for their quality.
Book publishers and state education officials opposed the legislation. State school Superintendent Jack O'Connell asked Gov. Schwarzenegger to veto the price-cap bill because it wou;d require an extensive multi-state survey of the cost of instructional materials to determine what the bill defines as "reasonable costs." Canciamilla says the survey would cost a mere fraction of the millions of dollars that would be saved. Canciamella and other sponsors of the price cap were motivated by press revelations that California versions of books cost more than versions in other states. Publishers responded that they customize their packages of books and related materials to meet varying demands in different states.
The California situation is being closely watched by educators nationwide because publishers tailor their products to meet state adoption preferences for the massive $400 million California, market. Products available elsewhere reflect the California preferences. Publishers are watching because pricing would be affected if the Legislature's proposals become law.
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Thomson to offer Harvard cases| CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, September 24, 2004 -- Harvard Business School Press signed a deal for Thomson Higher Education to distribute its case collections and article reprints. By integrating the materials into Thomson's Textchoice 2 online database, the materials will be easily available to adopters of Thomson texts as supplements. The Harvard collection includes 9,500 case studies and background notes. Included too is material from collections at Babson College, Business Enterprise Trust, Design Management Institute, IESE, IMD, Richard Ivey School of Business, Stanford University, and the University of Hong Kong. |
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THOMSON
HIGHER
EDUCATION
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HARVARD
BUSINESS
SCHOOL
PRESS
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John H. Ewing. "Open Access to Journals Won't Lower Prices," Chronicle of Higher Education (October 1, 2004), Pages B20. Ewing, executive director of the American Mathematical Society, argues that the crisis with scholarly journals isn't limitations on access but pricing. Open-access journals, he says, merely shift production costs from subscribers, mostly libraries, to authors. Only when pricing is seen as the root problem can effective solutions be found, he says.
Cornell claims online breakthrough| ITHACA, New York, September 23, 2004 -- The DPubS software developed at Cornell University will be made available free to help university presses move into online publishing. Thomas Hickerson, information technologies librarian, said publishers have been invited to an October preview of a beta version of DPubS, short for Digital Publishing System. The system, Hickerson said, would give cutting-edge capabilities budget-strapped university presses. Commercial tools for online journal publishing and text management run well into six figures, he said. The software was developed with a $670,000 Mellon Foundation grant. The first project using DPubS will be the journal Pennsylvania History from Pennsylvania State University, Hickerson said. |
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Author leaves Parsons over plagiary| NEW YORK, September 22, 2004 -- Author Roger Shepherd resigned under pressure from the Parsons School of Design faculty at the New School University amid charges of plagiarism in his 2002 book published by McGraw-Hill. Shepherd acknowledged the copying, which he blamed partly on a research assistant but for which he accepted responsibility. The resignation followed a meeting with Parsons administrators. The dean, Paul Goldberger, called the plagiarism unacceptable and something for which a student would be dismissed. McGraw-Hill has destroyed remaining copies of the book, Structures of Our Time: Buildings That Changed Modern Life. Portions were lifted from a 1995 book by architectural historian Meredith Clausen, Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, from MIT Press. There were also sections taken from Princeton University Press titles. |
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Oxford buys Lexis law list| NEW YORK, September 18, 2004 -- Online data provider LexisNexis, which has wanted to leave textbook publishimg, sold its its British-oriented list to Oxford University Press. The list includes Smith & Hogan's Criminal Law and Hepple, Howarth & Matthews and Tort-Cases and Materials. Terms were not announced. Lexis said the sale will help its focus on its Butterworths online data base that is widely used in British law. |
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Thomson buys testing firm Capstar| NEW YORK, September 17, 2004 -- Education publisher Thomson has expanded further into the testing business by buying Capstar from Educational Testing Service. Terms were not announced. Ronald Schlosser, Thomson Learning chief executive, said that Capstar products will enable Thomson's Prometric unit to expand into government and proferssional testing. |
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THOMSON
LEARNING
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Supp house buys Guidance Channel| PLAINVIEW, New York, September 16, 2004 -- The Guidancec Channel, which has 5,000 products geared to at-risk touths, has been sold to supplemental publisher School Specialty. Sale price: $19 million. Guidance products include videos, multimedia programs, handouts and therapetic games. The Guidance products will be added to School Specialty's Sunburst and Teacher's Video lines. |
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Lexis wins federal contract| NEW YORK, September 15, 2004 --Legal database provider LexisNexis won a 10-,year federal contract for a web portal exclusively for federal judges and court staff members, including defenders and probation officers. The service will include the Martindale-Hubbell law directory, Shepard's citations service and Matthew Bender treatises. |
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| RECENT TITLES AND ACTIVITIES |
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| Gerald C. Davison (psychology), University of Southern California, John M. Neale (psychology), and Ann Kring (psychology), University of California at Berkeley, wrote the ninth edition of Abnormal Psychology (Wiley). |
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| Thomas A. Shipka (philosophy), Youngstown State University, wrote Paradox and Discovery (McGraw-Hill). |
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| Susan Krauss Whitbourne (psychology), University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote the second editon of Adult Development and Aging: Biopsychosocial Perspectives (Wiley). |
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Please
tell
us
about
your
latest
project:
EDITOR |
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MIT sues McGraw in plagiary caseNEW YORK, September 14, 2004 -- The publisher of Meredith Clausen's Pietro Belluschi: Modern American Architect, MIT Press, accused McGraw-Hill for copyright infringement, alleging that section of the Clausen book were used in a 2002 McGraw book without permission. MIT Press called for monetary damages but did not specify how much. Also, MIT demanded an apology from to Clausen from Roger Shepherd, author of the McGraw Book, Structures of Our Time: Thirty-one Buildings That Changed Modern Life. Shepard, a professor of fine arts at the Parsons School of Design in New York. has acknowledged the duplication, which he attributes partly to an assistant. McGraw has destroyed all unsold copies of the book.
The Chronicle of Higher Education quoted Shepherd from an interview that some of Clausen's book had been put into a manuscript draft "as rough stuff" with the intent to rework it, but it remained in. "It had something to do with one of the research assistants I had hired, and the pressure I was under during 9/11," he said. "There's really no excuse." The similarities involce 19 passages from Clausens's Pietro Belluschi, including several long paragraphs with only slight wording and punctuation changes. |
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Wiley college sales take battering| HOBOKEN, New Jersey, September 12, 2004 -- A lot went wrong for college textbook sales at Wiley in the company's first quarter, said chief executive Will Pesce. He attributed ta 4.8 percent decline in sales, compared to a year earlier, to continuing inroads by the used-book marketers and to delayed ordering and tighter inventory management by campus stores. Another factor, Pesce said, was textbook sharing among students and direct student purchases of textbooks from abroad, where publishers sell the books for less. The answer, Pesce said, is moving textbook content into course management systems like Blackboard and Desire2Learn, In the meantime, college publishers can expect a "bumpy ride," he said. |
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Houghton trio creates company| NATICK, Massachusetts, September 11, 2004 -- Former long-term Houghton Mifflin chief executive Nader Darehshori and two fellow former Houghton execs, George Logue and David Cappellucci, launched a publishing company aimed at improving pre-K-12 pupil achievement. The company, Cambium Learning, said it is committed to a high level of achievement for at-risk, minority, impoverished and special-ed pupils. Cambium has acquired the assets of Sopris West, whose products focus on at-risk pupils, and Metro Learning, whose focus has been minority pupils. Darehshori said Cambium is committed to tailored products: "Clearly the standardized one-size-fits-all curriculum does not work." |
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U-press, college sales pick upNEW YORK, September 10, 2004 -- Sales for university press hardcover books witnessed a significant gain of 23.4 percent, to $12.3 million, in July, according to the latest data from the Association of American Publishers. The category has gained over the summer and is now up 10 percent for the year. Here is the year-to-date data as extrapolated from 92 reporting publishers:
Prof'l, scholarly
Univ press (hard)
Univ press (soft)
College
El-hi |
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| July
26.1%
23.4%
9.1%
4.3%
--1.2%
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| Year-
to-date
43.6%
10.0%
7.1%
3.2%
-2.9%
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Association of American Publishers |
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Texas court: Officials need sense of humorAUSTIN, Texas, September 9, 2004 -- The Texas Supreme Court dismissed a libel suit brought by two public officials against the Dallas Observer over an article that satirized them. The decision confirmed the First Amendment exemption of satire from libel law, at least when public officials are the target. The owner of the Observer, New Times, Inc., had lost in a lower court over a fictitious article satirizing the actions of local officials who jailed a seventh-grader for writing a school-assigned Halloween essay. The article bore resemblance to actual events in Denton County, Texas, where, six months after the Columbine massacre, the seventh-grader went to jail for an essay on the shooting of two students and a teacher.
The Texas Supreme Court was unanimous, saying even if some readers were misled into thinking the Observer article was factual, the newspaper clearly intended satire. "The question is not whether some actual readers were misled, as they inevitably will be, but whether the hypothetical reasonable reader could," the Court ruled. "This is not the same as asking whether all readers actually understood the satire or 'got the joke.'" The Supreme Court also rejected a lower court finding that the ridiculed aimed at the officials could be construed as evidence of actual malice, ruling that "actual malice concerns the defendant's attitude toward the truth, not toward the plaintiff."
The sature in the Observer, an alternative weekly, mocked the officials in an article titled "Stop the Madness" about a fictional 6-year old girl had been arrested in her first grade class for writing a book report on Where the Wild Things Are and mentioned the cannibalism, fanaticism and disorderly conduct.Outageious fictional quotes fwere attributed to several real people, including then-Governor George W. Bush, a representative of the ACLU, prosecutorBruce Isaacks and juvenile court judge Darlene Whitten. Isaacks and Whitten sued for defamation. Both the trial court and the Texas Court of Appeals refused to throw the case out, finding there to be issues for the jury as to whether a "reasonable person" would believe the story to be true and whether the defendants were malicious and reckless. |
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| New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks et al. |
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Pearson launches assessment line| NEW YORK, September 8, 2004 -- Pearson Education published its first formative assessment products designed to predict student growth toward meeting state performance standards. The line, called the Progress Assessment Series, begins with PASeries Reading and PASeries Mathematics. The products Lexile scale for reading measurement and the Quantile scale for mathematics. |
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Super index adds McGraw, Greenwood| WASHINGTON, September 3, 2004 -- The Internet indexing system DOI, short for direct object identifier, will be used by McGraw-Hill and Greenwood Publishing, said proprietor Content Directions Inc. With DOI, publishers can list all their titles on a web-like site that, no matter how large it grows, can be updated instantly with no bad links. Information will include products details and even the names and locations of retailers for every title. McGraw Hill will first post 15,000 professional titles and 8,000 AccessScience articles. Greenwood will post 18,000 titles. Publishers that signed earlier with Content Directions include Acropolis, ibooks, Peguin e-books, and Thomson, . |
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Scholastic, NFL team on free kit| NEW YORK, September 2, 2004 -- El-hi publisher Scholastic and the National Football League introduced a curriculum kit on diversity, prejudice and post 9/11 fears. Called łOne World: Connecting Communities, Cultures, and Classrooms,˛ the kit includes a teaching guide, a writing and reading journal and a classroom game. The program is free, downloadable from One World. |
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| Reed Elsevier Sales fell 3 percent to U.S.$4.1 billion in the first half, compared to a year earlier. Operating profits grew slightly to U.S.$898 million. Education revenue fell 7.2 percent to U.S.$653 million. Education operating profit was flat at U.S.$280 million. U.S. education profits were not broken
out.
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Holtzbrinck taps Hyperion for forecasts| NEW YORK, September 1, 2004 -- Holtzbrinck Publishing, whose units include St. Martin's tetxbooks, chose Hyperion Financial Management as its primary system for planning and forecasting analysis down to the per-book level. The Hyperion system is designed to eliminate manual and redundant processes and maximize data warehouse output for highly detailed information on the profitability individual titles. |
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