Established and Reputed Publishing Houses Enter Self Publishing Business

Last week Pearson, the owner of Penguin Books, bought one of the largest grassroots publishers, Author Solutions, based in Indiana, in the US, for £74m ($116m).

Author Solutions started in 2007, has marketed and distributed 190,000 titles for 150,000 authors and has grown at a rate of 12% in the past three years.

BookStats, which has collected data from 2,000 publishers across America, including fiction titles, as well as higher education, professional and academic publishing products found that ebook revenues for US publishers doubled to more than $2bn in 2011. 211,000 self-published books made their debut last year, 50% up on the previous year.

John Makinson, Penguin's chief executive, has pointed out that the company is once more in the vanguard position to support the upcoming segment in publishing business.




http://finance.yahoo.com/news/penguin-buys-self-publishing-author-121910166.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444464304577537092288601370.html