Libboo’s goal is to build buzz around books by connecting “buzzers,” or “readers who love to share and talk about books,” with books in order to “create the next digital bestseller and help talented authors get discovered.” They’re asked to do things like post a book’s cover to Facebook or write a blog post about a book and tweet the link to the post. In return, they get rewards like free ebooks.

Libboo, based in Cambridge, Mass., was founded by Chris Howard, a food writer and former teaching assistant at Harvard.

Last week, Boston-based publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt partnered with Libboo to promote new titles Diving Belles by Lucy Wood, The Heart and the Fist by Eric Greitens and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, as well as a number of backlist titles.

Hubspot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, Avid and Wildfire founder Bill Warner, and former Compete CEO Don McLagan also participated in the round.

Earlier this week, Tablet magazine’s Michael Moynihan reported that Lehrer had fabricated Bob Dylan quotes in the bestselling Imagine. It had previously been discovered that Lehrer was reusing his own material in New Yorker blog posts. Lehrer resigned from his position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has stopped shipping physical copies of Imagine and the ebook is no longer for sale.

To the right is the ad that appeared this morning in Shelf Awareness, an email newsletter aimed at booksellers. (Note: The image may not appear in this post if your ad blocker is on.) Publishers Marketplace reporter Sarah Weinman pointed out the ad on Twitter.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had no comment on whether it is running the ads elsewhere.

Updated 8/6/12: HMH is also offering refunds to readers who purchased a print copy of the book, but notes ”consumers must submit requests to the retailer from which the e-book was originally purchased.” Here’s how to do that:

Amazon Kindle: Contact customer service if you are outside the normal 7-day window for ebook returns.

Barnes & Noble Nook: Call 1-800-The-BOOK or visit in-store customer service.

Kobo: Contact Kobo customer service.

New York Times book publishing reporter Julie Bosman first reported Lehrer’s resignation on Twitter.

Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is “exploring all options available to us,” HMH spokeswoman Lori Glazer said in a statement. “We are taking the ebook of Imagine off-sale, and halting shipment of physical copies.” (For now, though, the book is still available on Amazon.)

Houghton Mifflin also provided a statement from Lehrer:

Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book Imagine. The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan  that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said.

The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed.

I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes K-12 educational books and general trade books, will focus on — what else? — tech. CEO Linda Zecher, who was previously a corporate VP at Microsoft, tells the WSJ that “she is pushing Houghton to strike more partnership deals, which she described as far more common in the tech business.” The company is also pursuing a “device-agnostic” strategy:

I want to broaden our technology partnerships. Bringing in your own device will one day be important in high school. We need to have products on all those devices, be it a Kindle Fire or a Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft’s Surface tablet, which the company announced last month, isn’t for sale yet, and pricing and availability details have not been announced. Saying that your books will be available on all devices sounds good, but in reality the cash-strapped HMH is likely to have to pick and choose which platforms to invest in. As Meredith chief digital officer Liz Schimel said at paidContent 2012 in May, “We get approached by a lot of companies and say no. HP knocked on the door, and we said no, we’re not going to do that one.” Most of Meredith’s readers are women, so if a platform or device is “too male-centric or too niche, we don’t do it.”

Likewise, HMH will need to look at where its readers are — and look at the types of devices high-school students are actually likely to own — and plan accordingly.

“It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he said.

Today blogger Edward Champion of Reluctant Habits found that Lehrer had also recycled his own previous material for use in his bestselling book “Imagine.” Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement:

Lehrer fully acknowledges that ‘Imagine’ draws upon work he has published in shorter form during the past several years and is sorry that was not made clear. He owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work.

Lehrer’s editor at the New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson, told Jacob Silverman at the Daily Beast, “He understands he made a serious mistake. He understands the rules. It’s definitely not going to happen again.”

Ruckus Reader titles can be downloaded individually, or parents can buy access to the whole library for $24.99 for six months. The first title in a series is free; after that, titles are $3.99 each or 2 for $5.99. For now, Ruckus Reader offers 25 titles — a mixture of interactive “iReaders” (enhanced e-books with video and games), straight e-books and “vidReaders” (video books narrated by celebrities like Meryl Streep and Robin Williams). Ruckus CEO Rick Richter, formerly president of the children’s division at Simon & Schuster, told me the company expects to include around 500 titles by the end of the year.

In addition to the brand-related content it developed itself, Ruckus is partnering with other book publishers to deliver e-books as well. The first partnership is with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is providing Curious George titles. Richter said other “major publishers” are “lined up.”

How do your kid’s reading skills stack up?

“Right now, 1 in 4 kids has access to an iPad,” Richter said. “In 70 percent of households where an iPad is resident, the child has access. In 40 percent of households, kids use the iPad every day. It’s a family device.”

Ruckus Reader tracks kids’ in-app reading skills — the apps support up to 4 accounts, so parents can track more than one child on the same title — and reports back to parents with a weekly “Reader Meter” e-mail that ranks children’s mastery of “phonics and word recognition, print awareness, fluency, alphabetic knowledge, sequencing and story comprehension in real time.” The rankings are weighed against the national Common Core State Standards. “We are trying to make sense of all the options available to children in a digital age and strive to understand when screen time is delivering real educational value,” Richter said in a statement.

Through a partnership with School Library Journal, each parent e-mail includes a list of recommended print books for their child’s reading level.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Mariner trade paperback imprint already publishes the print editions of around a dozen Amazon Publishing titles, such as The Hangman’s Daughter. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is creating a new imprint, called New Harvest, for the print versions of the Amazon Publishing East Coast titles — by authors like Tim Ferriss, Penny Marshall, Deepak Chopra and, most recently, James Franco.

“Our goal has been, and remains, to introduce authors to as many readers as possible,” said Larry Kirshbaum, VP and Publisher of Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group. “This new agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enables us to broaden our distribution and get our books into more readers’ hands.”

Amazon recently acquired the rights to about 400 children’s books published by Marshall Cavendish, but although those titles will be part of Larry Kirshbaum’s East Coast division, they are not included in the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt deal.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is headquartered in Boston and also has offices in New York, is not a big six publisher but it is well-known (it is the publisher of Curious George, JRR Tolkien and the “Best American…” series) and publishes a few hundred adults and children’s trade titles per year, plus educational titles. The company averted possible bankruptcy in 2010 by restructuring its debts. In November 2011 it announced it would lay off about 10 percent of its staff, the Financial Times reported.

Larry Kirshbaum’s East Coast division, which seriously needs a better name than “Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group,” is aiming at a general audience and bookstores remain a major place of discovery of new titles. Amazon’s agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt appears to be a workaround to Amazon’s Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) problem: Barnes & Noble has said it will not carry any titles in its bricks-and-mortar stores that it cannot also sell as e-books. If Amazon were distributing its own print titles and did not capitulate to Barnes & Noble’s requirement, Penny Marshall’s memoir would likely not be appearing in your local Barnes & Noble anytime soon even though a print-book-buying audience is likely to contribute to a large portion of her sales. (For every Laverne & Shirley fan who owns an e-reader, there’s surely another who doesn’t, or who would like to give this print book to their grandma for Mother’s Day.

Since Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will hold the print rights to the East Coast titles — and Amazon’s official announcement clearly calls this a “print licensing agreement” — it should be able to get them into Barnes & Noble without Amazon and B&N having to strike any new agreement (though Barnes & Noble can still decline to carry these titles, or any other titles from any other publisher). And Amazon will continue to sell its e-books exclusively through Amazon.com, keeping all its digital sales for itself. (Update 1/25/12: In the light of day, and after reading this on Publishers Marketplace, I realize that Amazon might still let Barnes & Noble sell some titles as e-books. The licensing agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt certainly doesn’t rule out that possibility.)

A possible wrinkle: Barnes & Noble could still refuse to carry Amazon Publishing titles if it is not allowed to sell them as e-books — as could any anti-Amazon independent bookstore. Barnes & Noble does carry the print version of The Hangman’s Daughter and other HMH-licensed Amazon titles, however. (It is available for pickup in my local Barnes & Noble now.) And the line from independent bookstores has tended to be that if their customers request Amazon Publishing titles, they will stock them, though they might be reluctant to do so otherwise.

Overall the move is unlikely to generate Amazon and Houghton Mifflin any goodwill from wary publishers and booksellers (though they may envy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for nabbing the licensing deal), but the company probably doesn’t care. This workaround appears to solve Amazon’s Barnes & Noble problem while simultaneously maximizing Amazon’s company’s e-book revenue and allowing it to sidestep the costs of training its own sales reps and sending them into bookstores around the country.

Official announcement on the next page.

Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Announce New Print Licensing Agreement

NEW YORK and SEATTLE-January 24, 2011-Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced a new licensing agreement between Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s newly named New Harvest imprint. New Harvest will now publish all of Amazon Publishing’s New York-based imprint’s adult titles in print and distribute them in North America outside of the Amazon.com platform.

Amazon Publishing’s East Coast Group, headed by Larry Kirshbaum, will publish narrative nonfiction, select literary fiction, business books and children’s/YA. Among the authors on the launch list are Tim Ferriss, Penny Marshall, Deepak Chopra, and James Franco, as well as the works of debut novelists, thought leaders in the cultural, business and academic world, and distinguished journalists. Its first list will debut in Fall 2012.

“We have had great success with previous Amazon titles, including ‘The Hangman’s Daughter,’ and we are thrilled to add New Harvest titles to the HMH list,” said Bruce Nichols, Senior Vice President and Publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s adult trade division.

“Our goal has been, and remains, to introduce authors to as many readers as possible,” said Larry Kirshbaum, Vice President and Publisher, Amazon Publishing, East Coast Group. “This new agreement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enables us to broaden our distribution and get our books into more readers’ hands.”

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will also continue to work with Amazon Publishing’s West Coast Group, headed by Victoria Griffith, under the Mariner banner. Under this relationship, which has been in place since April 2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will continue to sub-license a number of books from Amazon’s Seattle-based imprints, which include AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing, Thomas & Mercer, Montlake Romance and 47North.

Apple announced this week that it is partnering with the three largest K-12 educational publishers to sell iPad textbooks. It will be entering an $8 billion industry where most of the funds are controlled by state governments and school districts, which can mean long and politically charged funding discussions. Unlike in the college market, startups in the K-12 market have struggled to gain venture capital. One reason, on top of the bureaucracy that companies have to deal with: the digital infrastructure in many K-12 schools is weak, with an average of three students for every device as well as more mundane problems like too few electrical outlets.

That said, there’s clearly some real opportunity: While many assume the K-12 market is largely controlled by the three big companies that Apple is partnering with, in fact, more than half of that $8 billion market isn’t. Here’s a look at some of the challenges and opportunities awaiting Apple.

How big is the K-12 education market?

The market is estimated at $8 billion. There are 50 million K-12 students in public schools in the U.S.

K-12 school publishing — including elementary and high school textbooks and other teaching materials — is the second-largest publishing category in the U.S. after trade. Net sales revenue was $5.5 billion in 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers. (K-12 publishing net sales revenue fell 12.4 percent between 2008 and 2009, but increased by 7.1 percent between 2009 and 2010. Overall, net sales revenue between 2008 and 2010 declined by 6.2 percent.)

How is the K-12 publishing market different from trade and higher-ed publishing?

The main difference is that state governments and school districts procure about 90 percent of the books. “It’s very much unlike the consumer market where we decide to go into Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) and buy a book,” says Jay Diskey, executive director of the AAP’s school division. “A school district will decide it needs a new reading program for its elementary school students and will request proposals from publishers. If the state likes the proposal, the contract is negotiated.”

Publishers don’t always sell the books individually; a parent may not be able to buy a single textbook, for instance. The AAP notes the average net unit price of a K-12 title was $65 in 2010, but extensive pricing data is difficult to obtain because so many books are bought in bulk by state governments and school districts.

Textbook rental doesn’t yet factor into K-12 education the way it does in higher ed, although some private and parochial schools are trying it.

Who are the main textbook publishers?

The K-12 textbook market is often seen as being dominated by just a few big companies, but that’s not entirely accurate, says Diskey. It’s true that three companies–McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP), Pearson (NYSE: PSO) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the same three companies that are partnering with Apple in its new digital textbook store — capture about 85 percent of the K-12 core textbook market, which is worth roughly $3.2 billion. (The rest of that core market is made up of books from niche publishers on subjects like foreign languages, art and music, and books for technical and vocational schools.)

With the whole market estimated at $8 billion, though, there is still about $5 billion up for grabs outside of core textbooks. That portion includes many players, publishers and technology companies. They publish supplemental materials like workbooks, encyclopedias, books for teachers and reference works, all in print and digital formats. “There is far more diversity in the market than I think a lot of people understand,” Diskey says.

What is the role of digital?

Digital products are becoming a more important part of the K-12 school publishing market. Revenues from digital products increased by 45.6 percent between 2008 and 2010, to $638.7 million, according to the AAP. (The market for print books is still much larger but revenues from print products declined 13.7 percent between 2008 and 2010, to $2.6 billion.)

Spending on e-learning as a percentage of overall K-12 education expenditure is small, according to the September 2011 White House report “Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology” — it makes up just $0.46 of every $100 spent, for a total of $2.9 billion. (Expenditure on e-learning in higher education is over ten times greater: $5.60 per $100 spent, a total of $24.4 billion.)

K-12 publishers all offer digital products now, but school districts have to decide how to buy them. The digital products are often bundled with print, but “a lot depends on the digital infrastructure in the school district and whether it can support digital learning,” says Diskey. “Not too many states have one-to-one student-to-hardware ratios. In order to have full-blown digital learning, students should have access to their own devices in the same way you had access to your own textbooks when you were in school.”

In fact, the national average ratio of students to hardware devices is three-to-one (three students for every computer, tablet, etc.) “That makes learning very difficult,” Diskey says — and is another way K-12 is different from higher ed. About 90 percent of students arrive at college with at least one electronic device like a laptop. netbook or tablet. “By and large, K-12 students do not arrive with these devices,” Diskey says. This raises questions about who will pay for the devices — family or school districts.

School districts must deal with more mundane issues as well, such as whether there are enough electrical outlets to charge devices. “Behind all this, there’s the backdrop of schools providing textbooks,” Diskey says. In many states, schools are required to fund textbooks, but those mandates don’t always extend to digital materials. It will take “massive funding” to provide the 50 million K-12 public school students with hardware.

How will digital adoption change in the next year or so?

“I think you’ll see more partnerships between publishers and hardware producers such as Apple and others,” says Diskey. “For a long time at the K-12 level, content providers and hardware developers have operated in different silos, but they need to be partnered. (The announcement by Apple) is very good for publishers — new softwtare tools and applications being developed means that more publishers, particularly smaller ones, can get into the digital market at the K-12 level. But there’s still a hangup at the school level with funding and availability of devices.”

What will encourage more entrepreneurship in the area? The White House report reiterates the challenges of selling new products into the market:

An important feature of the market for K-12 educational technology products is the large number of institutional purchasers, each with its own distinct curriculum and procurement process. The school district is the relevant decision unit for most institutional purchases. Selling an educational product to a school district may require substantial contact with a diverse set of actors, including state and local procurement officers who oversee funding streams, academic consultants who advise districts, key school board members, and principals and teachers in individual schools. Moreover, decisions about purchases often involve an extended timeline.

Those barriers help explain why very little venture capital is spent on K-12 education: “In the last five years, estimates suggest that venture capital has totaled perhaps $200 million annually for education companies, backing an average of 25 new businesses per year. This venture capital investment compares to $4.4 billion for biotechnology, $3.0 billion for medical devices, and $4.8 billion for software.”

In a paper on K-12 entrepreneurship, Larry Berger and David Stevenson, the founders of K-12 tech product company Wireless Generation, describe some of the “relatively simple steps that districts, policymakers, foundations and entrepreneurs themselves could take to work around the barriers or dismantle them entirely.” They suggest that school districts and states could form consortia “in which they pool their resources and their expertise to help bring a new product or service to market.”

Berger and Stevenson also say states should comission more research and development instead of requiring a finished product. “When NASA wants a new spacecraft, it does not expect Boeing and Lockheed to build it on their own dimes in the hope of getting the contract,” they note. “It invites the industry to submit proposals and sometimes even funds the early development of competing designs — and then it picks a team with which it will work closely to bring a new product into existence.”

Finally, Berger and Stevenson note, “Entrepreneurship is often driven by the search for, and discovery of, ‘disruptive’ technologies and business models that transform a sector. It is not easy to figure out how the education sector should welcome disruptions and innovations that do not exist yet, but a simple first step would be to ask for them — to articulate the demands that would inspire entrepreneurs to try to create a supply.”

Sources:
– The Association of American Publishers, interviews and statistics
– National Center for Education Statistics
– “K-12 Entrepreneurship: Slow Entry, Distant Exit” by Larry Berger and David Stevenson. PDF here.
– “Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology,” Executive Office of the President Council of Economic Advisers, September 2011. PDF here.

According to a report in the WSJ, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is forging partnerships with educational publishers to produce the new “iTextbooks”.

Ars Technica goes one step further and describes the event as the first step in a new platform for e-book publishing on iOS — a “Garage Band” for e-books — which will work on iPad and iPhone devices, but also be compatible with other devices because it will run on the new ePub 3 standard; Apple currently supports ePub 2, which is sometimes not compatible with other e-reader platforms beyond iBookstore, depending on the extensions that publishers use.

The WSJ story further notes that Apple has been working with McGraw-Hill (NYSE: MHP) since June 2011 on an announcement. Another publisher that focuses on higher education, Cengage, is also attending the event on Thursday, but declined to comment for the article. Other publishers named in the article but not specifically in connection with the event on Thursday are Pearson (NYSE: PSO) and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Neither article had details on how these publishing deals or educational services would be structured: Apple currently takes a 30 percent cut on apps and other content that it publishes for iOS devices; will the same apply in the educational sphere when the intended “customers” are non-profit schools and students?

Whatever precise direction the announcement takes, it will be another step in how Apple is using its already-strong base in one sector — in this case, education — to expand its wider product offering, by using services to help drive more sales in its higher-margin, higher-value devices business.

As we noted last week when the event was formally announced, Apple has made a lot of inroads into educational services — not just with special discounts for students and teachers, but also in the form of iPad donations to special educational projects.