Publishing News
General News
June 1-15, 2005 Edition GENERAL NEWS Pearson, Audible
Team Up to Offer
Learning Products
NEW YORK, NY/05/17/05Pearson Higher Education, part of Pearson plc (LSE: PSON; NYSE: PSO), and Audible, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADBL) have announced a strategic alliance to deliver innovative audio learning products to the higher education market. The partnership brings together Pearson, the global leader in educational publishing and the market share leader in the $6 billion higher education market, and Audible, Inc.(R), the company that has defined and leads the spoken-word digital audio download category.
The audio products developed by the companies will be distributed by Audible.com(R) and available for download to more than 130 AudibleReady(R) digital audio devices, including iPods(R), other MP3 players, PDA's, and smart wireless devices gaining such broad consumer acceptance, particularly on campuses.
This agreement emphasizes Pearson's strong focus on customizing learning tools to new technology and providing more choice and value options for students. Audible will utilize its original audio production capacity to create and make available Pearson Higher Education study guides in downloadable audio format.
The companies expect the first exclusive audio studio guide products to be available for download for the 2005-2006 academic year. Pearson Education and Audible will also create and co-market educational audio products for the general consumer, beginning in 2005.
"This landscape-shifting relationship opens up a whole new channel of content delivery choices for students at a price students, and their parents, will appreciate," commented Will Ethridge, chief executive officer of Pearson Higher Education, International, and Professional Publishing. "This strategic relationship brings together Pearson's market-leadership, years of research in performance-based learning, and the largest and most successful higher education sales force in the world, with Audible's industry-leading spoken word audio download capability and Audible's distribution partners including Apple(R) iTunes(R) and Amazon.com."
"We recently formed Audible Education to create and distribute educational digital audio to scholastic, professional, and general learners of all ages," said Donald Katz, Audible's chairman and chief executive. "From the many hundreds of thousands of Audible.com(R) customers currently using our premium audio programming to learn and become more successful, Audible has become a powerful tool for productivity and learning. This strategic relationship with Pearson couldn't be more appropriate to a mission our companies will now share. We believe this will be a mutually profitable and culturally meaningful partnership in every way."
Ethridge added, "There is compelling research that identifies 30% of our population as auditory learners. By coupling this research with the growing popularity of downloadable audio, we believe these study guides can make a significant difference in student performance by accommodating diverse learning and life styles. Students today want the option to be untethered from traditional modes of learning. This product line fills a much-needed gap in learning content for a mobile and multitasking generation."
ABOUT PEARSON EDUCATION
Educating 100 million people worldwide, Pearson Education ( www.pearsoned.com) is the global leader in educational publishing, providing research-based print and digital programs to help students of all ages learn at their own pace, in their own way. While virtually all students in America learn from a Pearson program at some point in their educational career, about three million college students are currently pursuing their courses online using Pearson Higher Education's products. Nearly 25,000 schools use Pearson technology to help instruct preK-12 students and manage how they are doing. Pearson provides schools customizable services to create, deliver, score and report educational assessments, both in print and online. The company is home to such renowned publishing brands as Pearson Prentice Hall, Pearson Longman, Pearson Scott Foresman, Pearson Early Learning, Pearson Learning Group, Pearson Digital Learning, and Pearson Addison Wesley. Pearson Education is part of Pearson (NYSE: PSO), the international media company. In addition to Pearson Education, Pearson's primary operations include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group.
ABOUT AUDIBLE, INC.
Audible(R) ( www.audible.com(R)) is the Internet's leading premium spoken word audio source. Content from Audible is downloaded and played back on personal computers, CDs, or AudibleReady(R) computer-based mobile devices. Audible has more than 70,000 hours of audio programs from more than 200 content partners that include leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers. Audible.com is Amazon.com's and the Apple(R) iTunes(R) Music Store's pre-eminent provider of spoken word products for downloading or streaming via the Web. Additionally, the Company is strategically aligned with Random House, Inc. in the first-ever imprint to produce spoken word content specifically suited for digital distribution, Random House Audible. Among the Company's key business relationships are Apple(R) Corp., Creative Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company, Microsoft(R) Corporation, palmOne, Inc., PhatNoise, Inc., Rio Audio, Sony Electronics, Texas Instruments Inc., and VoiceAge Corporation.
Audible, www.audible.com, AudibleListener, and AudibleReady are registered trademarks of Audible, Inc. and all are part of the family of Audible, Inc. trademarks.
Forgotten Play
By Jack Kerouac
to Be Published
New York, NY/05/25/05Excerpts from an unpublished play by Jack Kerouac, discovered in a New Jersey warehouse, will now be published in Best Life, a monthly men's magazine.
An excerpt from the three-act play, "Beat Generation," will appear in the July issue of the men's lifestyle magazine.
Best Life editor-in-chief Stephen Perrine said it's an incredible discovery by one of the biggest names in American literature.
Kerouac was best-known for his classic novel of the Beat Generation, On the Road. The re-discovered play was written in 1957 and portrays the drunken Jack Duluoz who parties with legends of the Beat generation, based on real-life people such as Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg.
The play lay among warehoused papers belonging to Kerouac's agent, Sterling Lord, until Perrine met with Lord over lunch and asked if he had any undiscovered manuscripts. Lord had recently combed through his old documents and seen the play. He told Perrine about the work and said that he had once approached Marlon Brando to do the project, but he declined, and Kerouac decided to shelve the project.
Apparently, the entire work will be published later this year, but a publisher has not been disclosed.
Simon & Schuster
Streamlines
Supply Chain
SCOTTSDALE, AZ, and ATLANTA/05/19/05Manhattan Associates®, Inc. (Nasdaq: MANH – News), the global leader in providing supply chain execution and optimization solutions, announced that Simon & Schuster, Inc., a global leader in general interest publishing, has implemented the Warehouse Management and Slotting Optimization components of its Integrated Logistics Solutions(TM) in the publisher's two main distribution centers.
According to Simon & Schuster, the result has been an improvement in the flow of goods, greater inventory visibility and more effective use of space in its facilities.
"After our first quarter of operation with the new solution in place, we achieved or exceeded all of the targets that we had set for ourselves," said Dave Schaeffer, vice president of distribution & fulfillment, Simon & Schuster. "No change of this magnitude is easy, but we are now even more efficient and better equipped to respond flexibly to our customers' requirements. We couldn't be more pleased with Manhattan Associates' solutions."
In the past, Simon & Schuster utilized numerous solutions in their distribution centers to manage their inventory and fulfill orders totaling more than 150-million books a year. These solutions were not flexible enough to keep up with the ever-changing compliance demands of its retail customers, vendors and third-party distribution clients. Manhattan Associates' Warehouse Management and Slotting Optimization solutions provided the company with integrated, flexible solutions that have optimized its two facilities and given it greater visibility into its inventory.
"Simon & Schuster's main distribution centers encompass more than 1.2 million square feet, so integrating and optimizing processes and increasing effective use of that space is critical to the success of its overall supply chain operations," said Jeff Mitchell, Manhattan Associates' executive vice president, Americas. "By implementing Manhattan Associates' warehouse management and slotting capabilities, they are better prepared to meet growing customer demand."
About Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Simon & Schuster, part of the entertainment operation of Viacom Inc., is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic, and multimedia formats. Its divisions include the Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Online, and international companies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonsays.com .
About Manhattan Associates, Inc.
Manhattan Associates, Inc., is the global leader in providing supply chain execution and optimization solutions. It enables operational excellence through its warehouse, transportation, distributed order management, reverse logistics and trading partner management applications, as well as its RFID, performance management and event management capabilities. These Integrated Logistics Solutions(TM) leverage state-of-the-art technologies, innovative practices and our domain expertise to enhance performance, profitability and competitive advantage. Manhattan Associates has licensed more than 900 customers representing more than 1,600 facilities worldwide, which include some of the world's leading manufacturers, distributors and retailers. For more information about Manhattan Associates, visit www.manh.com .
