Amazon is cracking down on merchants using its site to sell counterfeit textbooks, CNBC reported. A sting operation lead to the suspension of at least 20 merchants — a move intended to send publishers a clear message that Amazon is a serious partner in their effort to prevent the sale of counterfeit product. Booksellers whose accounts were suspended had all shipped counterfeit books to one Clara Dufour – a fake name, perhaps one carefully chosen boost the story’s PR. Amazon soon issued a statement: “These counterfeit books were caught in a test buy program we operate, which is just one […]
Textbooks
Amazon Launches Self-Published Textbook Creator, KDP EDU
Apple launched iBooks Author all the way back in early 2012, so the only surprise about Amazon’s new self-published digital textbook platform, KDP EDU, is that it took so long. The public beta of Amazon’s Kindle Textbook Creator tool allows educators to turn PDFs of their textbooks and course materials into Kindle books. Available features include flashcards, multi-color highlighting, and the ability to capture key phrases and images and save them to a single location. (Textbooks created with Amazon’s tool are “only available through the Kindle store,” per Amazon’s EULA, just as Apple limits ebooks created with their software to their store.) KDP director […]
eNews: Google Adds Textbooks, and More
For most people Google’s Chromecast (a dongle that lets you display video from computers and tablets on a TV screen) was their most enticing product announcement on Wednesday. But those announcements included the news that digital textbooks will be added to the US Google Play store in August. Google will join Kindle, Nook, iBookstore, CourseSmart and others in providing “a full catalog of higher education titles in math, science, history and more” for purchase or rental. For now they make the same claim as Kindle and others on pricing — that digital rental can provide “up to [an] 80 percent […]
Textbook Time: Kno Adds K-12 eTexts and Amazon Joins Book Rental Market
Back to school time looms, which means more textbook announcements. Start-up Kno is expanding from their base in college textbooks to the K-12 textbook market. They offer one-year rentals for $9.99 or less (though any parent knows that trying to “finally stop their kids from carrying their heavy backpacks to and from school” is a pipe dream). Their first K-12 digital textbooks come from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In a separate press release, Amazon announced that they are finally renting physical textbooks to college students, just like most of the major competitors in the market (from Barnes & Noble College, Nebraska […]
Corporate News: Scholastic Buys Learners Publishing; Bertelsmann Sells 50 Percent Stake in Pubbles to Weltbild
Scholastic announced Monday that its Singapore subsidiary acquired Learners Publishing, a Singapore-based publisher of supplemental English-language learning materials which has published more than 400 titles since its founding in 2000. “Through this acquisition, Scholastic’s offering of products in the English Language Learning segment is significantly enhanced,” Scholastic International president, growth markets Shane Armstrong said in the release. “Learners’ talented team and its list of outstanding titles will assist Scholastic in accelerating educational publishing growth in International markets.” Regulators approved Bertelsmann’s deal to sell half of its stake in German e-reading store/platform Pubbles to Weltbild for an undisclosed sum. The deal was […]
Cengage Swings to Loss; Will Need to Refinance
Cengage had sales of $1.88 billion in their most recent fiscal year, ending in June, but the textbook company went from income of $47 million in the previous year to a loss of $37 million. Thirty-one percent of recents come from digital products and print-and-digital bundles. Bought by Apax Partners in the overvalued days of cheap and abundant credit in 2007 for $7.75 billion, the company still carries gross debt of $5.7 billion, which costs $480 million a year in interest. CEO Ron Dunn “says it will need to refinance within 18 months,” but also indicates to the FT there […]