Until I opened an email this morning from a publicist at the Penguin Group (USA), who'd sent me a press release about the company's newest so-called "creativity app," The Pocket Scavenger, I was under the impression that I was at least somewhat tuned in to the world of Android apps. But apparently, not so much. Penguin, it seems, has been busy releasing quite an impressive suite of creativity apps lately, and like their latest, The Pocket Scavenger, many are based on the books of author, illustrator and self-described guerrilla artist Keri Smith. Smith writes books that are not only about creativity, but that actually encourage it...

Multi-Million Dollar Class-Action Lawsuit Filed Against Penguin, Author Solutions (The Digital Reader) 2012 eBook Sales Increased by 66% in the UK (Good e-Reader) The Atlantic Launches New eBook Division with e-Singles and Curated Content (Paid Content) Permission-Based Publishing: The New York Publishing Model and Why it Doesn't Work (Huffington Post) Kindle Daily Deals: Greatest Knight by Elizabeth Chadwick (and 3 others)  ...

OverDrive's Upcoming API Will Allow Ebook Checkout Directly from OPAC (The Digital Shift) Publishing should fight ebook retailers for more data (Boing Boing) Ebook anxieties increase as publishing revolution rolls on (The Guardian Judge: No Jury for Penguin in E-book Case (Publishers Weekly) Kindle Daily Deals: American Gods by Neil Gaiman (and 3 others)    ...

E-books seem to be costing consumers less money. Digital Book World tracks the prices of e-books on the best-sellers lists every week. Last week, the news site found e-books on the lists averaged more than $8 a book. After a week where a new publisher (Macmillan) allowed discounted prices, the average price of e-books on the best-sellers list dropped to $7.21, a record low, according to DBW. One of the more interesting notes from DBW’s research is that $9.99 doesn’t seem to be a popular price anymore. This price point has been reserved for newer popular books and those that retailers can definitely...

Poems by Heart is a new app from Penguin Classics designed to help readers memorize great poems. It's a clever concept. You can browse the available poems and read them—or have them read to you with narration. And when you're ready to learn the poem, a fill-in-the-blanks game that gets progressively more difficult helps you learn the poem in stages. The app comes with two free poems, a Shakespeare sonnet and a William Blake poem. I tried the sonnet first because I actually know this one already; I had a college Shakespeare professor who let us earn extra credit by memorizing...

You may have already seen that Penguin is going to stop the windowing of library book titles. That's a good thing, and I applaud the decision. I'd be more excited if my library was part of the 3M system, and if Penguin wasn't having books "expire" and require a repurchase every year, but some library books is better than none, I guess. What's going to be interesting to watch is how the merger of Random and Penguin handle library books. Right now the two companies have completely different policies and pricing, and Random House is in Overdrive, where Penguin isn't. We'll keep...

Report: Penguin to Cease Windowing Library Titles (Digital Book World) UK Government Releases New Report on Library Lending (Good e-Reader) Battle Lines Drawn in HarperCollins/Open Road eBook Suit (Publisher's Weekly) License Restrictions: A Fool's Errand (Nature.com) Kindle Daily Deals: Nate in Venice by Richard Russo (and 3 others)  ...

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by the  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, Bookish is now a reality, a place where users can get recommendations—based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like—and then, importantly, purchase them. Like the Random House project BookScout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase...

              Pearson Launches New Incubator Company for Startup Companies (Good e-Reader) Amazon's Price Parity Clause Attracts Attention of German Antitrust Regulator (GigaOM) Audible Users Get an iPad App (Galley Cat) Random-Penguin & Libraries (Digital Book World) Kindle Daily Deals: The Cider House Rules by John Irving (and 3 others)...

One hurdle down. Several more to go with the EU, Canadian Competition Bureau and various other antitrust authorities around the world still needing to weigh in on this. Penguin's settlement with the Justice Department was a move to smooth the way for this merger, and it looks like that move worked. Note that Random House, not included in the price-fixing case, will be bound by the terms of the Penguin settlement. Who owns how much of what? For those who are keeping score, according to the announcement: Following completion, Bertelsmann will own 53% and Pearson 47% of Penguin Random House. It will encompass...

Apple is now the lone hold-out. As you may recall, three publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster—immediately settled, leaving Penguin, MacMillan and Apple to fight it out in court. Penguin settled in December, probably to protect their pending merger with Random House. And now Macmillan joins its fellows. Macmillan CEO John Sargent cited financial reasons for the settlement, according to this story on Publishers Lunch: "Our company is not large enough to risk a worst case judgment. In this action the government accused five publishers and Apple of conspiring to raise prices. As each publisher settled, the remaining defendants became responsible not only...

In partnership with a Bloomington, Ind.-based self-publishing organization known as Author Solutions, Penguin Books India made an interesting move today by launching a self-publishing platform specifically for the Indian audience. It's a tactic that may one day soon bring the Subcontinent at least somewhat closer to actualizing the self-publishing revolution that seems to have taken over much of the western world. Partridge Publishing is the name of the new platform, and in a release distributed by Penguin Books India today, the company suggested that it will soon be "opening up opportunities for aspiring writers [in India] who don't have enough means to get their...