Simon Schuster

She won three swimming medals when she was only 14, has posed for Playboy and struggled with drugs and eating disorders. Now Beard is telling her story, and the release of her new memoir will hopefully coincide with her bid to qualify for the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Instead of licensing the digital rights to Penguin, Ian Fleming's literary estate is making the e-book editions available directly itself. Getting the most out of the Bond brand is the estate's rationale for keeping the e-books in-house.

Two of the Big Six publishing houses reported a rise in sales this week, further evidence that the worst of the industry's doldrums may be coming to an end. Simon & Schuster also increased profit, while HarperCollins remained in the red.

Book publisher Simon & Schuster did not have the greatest of first quarters, according to the report released Wednesday: Sales and earnings dropped or were flat compared to a year ago. The bright spot, however, came on the digital side, with e-book sales zooming up.

You'd think that not having to buy an honest-to-goodness book, with its manufacturing costs, would save you money. Not so much anymore, thanks to competition from Apple's new iPad, which makes its official debut Saturday. Amazon.com will no longer heavily discount e-book best-sellers, following a...

While parent company CBS ended 2009 with a modest 1% dip in sales, the same could not be said for its book publishing arm Simon & Schuster. For the fourth quarter ending Dec. 31, S&S reported sales of $220 million, a 10% drop (or $25 million) from the previous year, and profits of $13.6 million, more than half as much ($28.5 million) the company earned in 2008.

Just three years ago, the Crown Publishing Group was the most profitable division of Random House, the largest U.S. trade publisher of the media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Boldface names -- Barack Obama, Rachael Ray, Deepak Chopra, Ann Coulter -- produced a string of hits. And narrative non-fiction...