Penguin, Simon & Schuster now claim 14-15% of sales are ebooks

all e-readers

Yesterday, Simon & Schuster’s parent company CBS announced that while the publisher made less money last quarter than the one before, ebook sales accounted for a greater percentage:

Publishing revenues for the second quarter of 2011 decreased 3% to $183 million from $189 million for the same prior-year period, as strong growth in the sale of more profitable digital content was offset by lower print book sales. Digital content revenues for the second quarter of 2011 more than doubled last year’s second quarter digital sales and represented 15% of Publishing’s total revenues.

This is in line with what Pearson reported about Penguin’s revenue for the first half of 2011 last week: “eBook sales grew 128% and now represent 14% of Penguin revenues worldwide.”

Read more on TeleRead

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Penguin gives indie bookstores a boost

Isn't this thoughtful?  Penguin books is helping indie bookstore by promoting their Google eBooks store.  A win-win, should I say?  Regardless, it's a move in the right direction.

Shelf Awareness notes that Penguin Group (USA) has been printing up in-store displays to remind shoppers that the store sells ebooks as well, then distributing them to independent bookstores: “So far, 40 have been created, and by the time the publisher is finished, some 200 stores will receive a custom easel.”


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Penguin's Parent company buys Borders

Well this is fun news.  Looks like Borders will be rescued...at least in Australia.  TeleRead announced this today here.  Of course, there's always a tiny sour note with every good one.  This little deal is being investigated to make sure Penguin is monopolizing the book industry out yonder.

"While Amazon was buying up The Book Depository, Pearson Australia, the parent company of Penguin Books, was busy negotiating with REDgroup to buy Australia’s Borders and Angus & Robertson websites. Other booksellers are now calling for an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to ensure that the deal won’t give Penguin an unfair competitive advantage in the tightly controlled Australian market.

From The Canberra Times:

"The acquisition, which has been in the works for just three weeks and is due to take effect on July 28, indirectly places one of the nation’s largest book publishers in competition with its core group of existing customers, bricks and mortar bookstores." "

Continue reading here.
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Penguin launches Classics app for your mobile devices

Screenshot of the Classics app for Penguin Books

For sixty-five years, Penguin Classics has been the leading publisher of literature in the English-speaking world, providing readers with a global bookshelf of the greatest works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. The Penguin Classics app puts the complete list of Penguin Classics in the palm of your hand in a fun and easy-to-use manner.

For those new to the Classics or unsure of what you want to read, the app features a “Discover the Classics” section that lets you pick what Classics you should read based on your interests. Give your iPhone a shake and let the app pick a title for you. In addition to featuring annotated descriptions of over 1,500 Penguin Classics titles, the app challenges readers to test their Penguin Classics knowledge with a fun and engaging quiz that spans over 65 Classics works.

Additional unique features include:

• A My Classics section where users can bookmark titles as well as keep track of Classics that they’ve read or want to read
• An Essential Classics section, a must for any Classics aficionado
• Facebook integration so you can share quiz scores, along with the Penguin Classics you’ve read and those you’re planning to read, with your Facebook friends
• The app will be continually updated with news, additional quizzes and lists, events info, and the latest Penguin Classics titles.

Requirement: You must have 3G or Wifi enabled on your device in order to utilize this App.

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Image credit: Penguin.com

100 Classic books you must read before you die

Penguin Books list of 100 classic books you must read. Here are Charles Dickens and Jane Austen's most classic novels.

How many books have you read in your lifetime?  Whether the number is as low as 0 or as high 1000, here's a list your should start working on.

Penguin Books had composed a list of 100 classic books everyone should read during their lifetime.  You may be surprised on how little of these you have actually read...I know I was, and I thought I've read a lot in my life.

Here is  Penguin Book list of 100 Classic books you must read before you die

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

2. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories – Nikolai Gogol

3. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

4. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

5. Notes From Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

6. Story of the Eye – Georges Bataille

7. Spy In House Of Love: V4 In Nin’S Continuous Novel – Anais Nin

8. Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D.H.Lawrence

9. Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

10. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer

11. The Karamazov Brothers – Fyodor Dostoevsky

12. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

13. Diamonds Are Forever – Ian Fleming

14. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov

15. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad

16. A Room With a View – E. M. Forster

17. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

18. Don Juan – Lord George Gordon Byron

19. Love in a Cold Climate- Nancy Mitford

20. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams

21. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

22. Middlemarch – George Eliot

23. She: A History of Adventure – H. Rider Haggard

24. The Fight – by Norman Mailer

25. No Easy Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela

26. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

27. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

28. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) – Victor Hugo

29. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

30. The Old Curiosity Shop – Charles Dickens

31. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

32. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Bram Stoker

33. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

34. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole

35. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James

36. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

37. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

38. Baby doll – Tennessee Williams

39. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote

40. Emma – Jane Austen

41. On the Road – Jack Kerouac

42. The Odyssey – Homer

43. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

44. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome

45. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

46. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

47. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh

48. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

49. The Beautiful and Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald

50. Against Nature – Joris-Karl Huysmans

51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X

52. The Outsider – Albert Camus

53. Animal Farm – George Orwell

54. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx

55. Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

56. The Time Machine – H. G. Wells

57. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick

58. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells

59. The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham

60. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin

61. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess

62. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga – Hunter S. Thompson

63. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

64. Another Country – James Baldwin

65. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote

66. Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk – William S. Burroughs

67. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins

68. Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas De Quincey

69. Subterraneans – Jack Kerouac

70. Monsieur Monde Vanishes – Georges Simenon

71. Nineteen Eighty-four – George Orwell

72. The Monkey Wrench Gang – Edward Abbey

73. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli

74. Bound for Glory – Arthur Miller

75. Death of a Salesman – Georges Simenon

76. Maigret and the Ghost – Georges Simenon

77. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

78. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

79. A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan, Sir Doyle

80. The Thirty-Nine Steps – John Buchan

81. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

82. Therese Raquin – Ãmile Zola

83. Les Liaisons dangereuses – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

84. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

85. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

86. I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 – Robert Graves

87. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton

88. The Beggar’s Opera – John Gay

89. The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius

90. Guys and Dolls – Hal Leonard Corporation

91. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

92. The Iliad of Homer – Homer

93. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

94. From Russia with Love – Ian Fleming

95. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

96. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

97. The Diary of a Nobody – George Grossmith

98. Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens

99. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh

100. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis

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Penguin Launches Book Country, An Online Community for Genre Fiction

Looking to support and develop writers of genre fiction, Penguin is launching a public beta of Book Country, a free online writing community and publishing services venture. In development for more than a year, Book Country offers writers a place to upload new works and receive feedback and criticism from a community of writers and readers; a place for agents and editors to look for new talent; and eventually the venture will offer a suite of self-publishing services that will offer e-book and print publication for a fee.

The Book Country online community is focused on supporting writers of genre fiction—from romance, fantasy, science fiction and thrillers to a range of contemporary hybrid genres like paranormal romance, urban fantasy and Steampunk. The site is free to use and anyone can get an account and begin uploading writing. However, the site is focused on providing feedback and support to developing writers and all Book Country members must first comment and review at least three works by different writers before they can start uploading their own works.


Book Country Home pageThe venture was conceived and developed initially by Molly Barton, director of business development at Penguin and president of Book Country. In a phone interview, Barton acknowledged that while Book Country is focused on developing writers, she expects to find new authors for Penguin through the site as well. But she also emphasized that Book Country will be “publisher agnostic” and encourages editors from Penguin as well as other publishers and literary agents to join the Book Country community. Agents or editors who wish to contact a writer about their work can notify Book Country staff who will then ask the writer if they want to be contacted. The private beta of Book Country has had about 500 members using it.

Although Barton said that Book Country will eventually offer writers self-publishing services (e-books and print-on-demand) for a fee, she said the soft launch of the public beta site will focus initially on building the community. However she did say that POD services “would not be outsourced.” Barton said, “all the other POD sites have been developed by tech companies. Book Country has been developed by a book publisher and we have taken pains to refine it and make it an easy to use self-publishing service for writers.”

She emphasized that while Book Country is owned by Penguin it has been organized as a separate company. Barton traveled to London more than a year ago to pitch the concept to the Pearson Innovation Fund, a seed fund created by Penguin’s parent company to encourage digital development at the firm. The site is designed for use on a wide variety of devices including tablets (there’s no Flash on the site). Barton was quick to note that Book Country, “is not Facebook for writers,” and has been designed to avoid a range of writer community problems: the cut and paste function has been disabled to limit the potential for blatant plagiarism and there is no way to forward text by email or download content from the site.

Book Country members build a profile based on the genres they like to read and can then seek out writers working in that area. Members can “follow” writers, much like other social media platforms, and review their works and receive merit badges for a variety of contributions to the site. Barton emphasized that the review process has been designed to not only highlight the best writers but also to track and rate the most effective reviewers, those whose feedback has been deemed by the community to be the most useful and highlight them as well. The site features message boards (former literary agent and popular Twitter personality Colleen Lindsay is a Book Country community manager and a moderater on the boards) covering everything from the craft of writing to the business of writing to industry news and gossip. CLICK HERE for the full story.