As part of Pearson’s focus on pedagogy, Pearson and its authors devote significant creative effort to develop effective, imaginative, and engaging questions to include in the textbooks it publishes. Pearson’s end-of-chapter questions are strategically designed and carefully calibrated to reinforce key concepts taught in the textbooks, test students’ comprehension of these issues, enhance students’ problem-solving skills, and, ultimately, improve students’ understanding of the subject matter. Pearson’s textbooks can contain hundreds or thousands of end-of-chapter questions. These end-of-chapter questions form core components of the teaching materials contained in Pearson textbooks and are frequently hallmarks of Pearson titles. As such, the availability, quality, and utility of these questions are often important considerations when educators select which textbooks to adopt for their courses.
Barnes & Noble has done well during COVID. News reports suggest double digit growth unseen 'since before Amazon (NYPost)
Industrywide, US sales of books are up 12 percent so far this year through August compared to the same period a year ago — and up 20 percent from 2019 over the same time period, according NPD Group, a market research company. CEO James Daunt says B&N sales have risen 6 percent since 2019.Jon Enoch Photography
“Double-digit growth in books has not happened since Amazon came along,” Barnes & Noble Chief Executive James Daunt told The Post in an interview.
Those kinds of numbers are encouraging for Elliott, a fund known for taking big positions in public companies and agitating for change: In this case, it bought B&N whole as a fixer-upper. A source familiar with the matter says Elliott is about halfway through its plan that would eventually spin the bookseller back onto the public markets — or sell it to another private buyer.
Guardian Opinion on proposed changes to UK copyright law:
It might sound like good news for book lovers too, but only in the short term. While books might become a bit cheaper, the long-term loss for readers has the potential to far overshadow the gain. “The loss of revenue will make publishers more risk-averse and close down access for new work,” Hilary Mantel has warned, with knock-on effects including cramping the innovation that feeds our film and TV industries.
Researchers and publishers respond to new UK open-access policy (Physics World)
IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, broadly welcomes the UKRI’s new open-access policy, which it says “aligns with our mission to expand physics globally”. However, it thinks that the requirement for researchers to deposit the final version of a manuscript in a repository under no embargo will be “harmful to the significant OA progress already made”. “This approach cannot form the basis for an economically viable publishing model for physics journals seeking to maintain the highest standards of peer review and publication.”
That view is echoed by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), which says it is “deeply concerned” that the UKRI policy gives equivalent status to the “subscription-tied accepted manuscript and the full OA publication of the version of record”. This, the STM says, could “jeopardize the continued progress of the open-access publishing transition by enabling an entirely unsustainable route”. The STM urges the UKRI board to “carefully consider these issues”.
An App called Libby (New Yorker)
The sudden shift to e-books had enormous practical and financial implications, not only for OverDrive but for public libraries across the country. Libraries can buy print books in bulk from any seller that they choose, and, thanks to a legal principle called the first-sale doctrine, they have the right to lend those books to any number of readers free of charge. But the first-sale doctrine does not apply to digital content. For the most part, publishers do not sell their e-books or audiobooks to libraries—they sell digital distribution rights to third-party venders, such as OverDrive, and people like Steve Potash sell lending rights to libraries. These rights often have an expiration date, and they make library e-books “a lot more expensive, in general, than print books,” Michelle Jeske, who oversees Denver’s public-library system, told me. Digital content gives publishers more power over prices, because it allows them to treat libraries differently than they treat other kinds of buyers. Last year, the Denver Public Library increased its digital checkouts by more than sixty per cent, to 2.3 million, and spent about a third of its collections budget on digital content, up from twenty per cent the year before.
Barnes & Noble Education Financial Results (Edgar)The story in brief: over their lifetimes, a pair of childless, mid–19th century North Country millowner brothers named William and Alfred Law assembled, with knowledge and discernment, a private collection of books and manuscripts. This library passed to successive descendants for a century, neither supplemented, catalogued, nor open to visitation by academics or enthusiasts—save on a few occasions which served only to enhance the legend of the collection’s existence. And now the entirety is for sale at Sotheby’s in London.
Very little is known about the Laws, but their taste and judgment give the lie to that snooty stereotype—vented if not invented by Dickens in Hard Times—of the hard-nosed industrialist for whom art and books are nowt but fancy folderols for fops and fools.
- Versus same period last year: Revenues up $40mm and Net Income flat on higher selling and admin costs
- Revenues up 30% for same quarter in 2020
- Significant improvement in Net Income
- Gain on sale of trade business $218mm
