Pearson Education, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc. The subsidiary was formed in 1998, when Pearson plc acquired Simon & Schuster's educational business and combined it with Pearson's existing education company Addison-WesleyLongman.[1] Pearson Education was restyled as simply Pearson in 2011.[3] In 2016, the diversified parent corporation Pearson plc rebranded to focus entirely on education publishing and services,[4] and as of 2023 Pearson Education is Pearson plc's main subsidiary.[5]
In 2019 the company began phasing out the prominence of its hard-copy textbooks in favor of digital textbooks, which cost the company far less, and can be updated frequently and easily.[6]
As of 2023, Pearson Education has testing/teaching centers in over 55 countries worldwide; the UK and the U.S. have the most centers.[5] The headquarters of parent company Pearson plc are in London, England.[5] Pearson Education's U.S. headquarters were in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey until the headquarters were closed at the end of 2014.[7] Most of Pearson Education's printing is done by third-party suppliers.[5]
Company history
Following the British government's acquisition and nationalization of several of Pearson's aviation, fuel, and energy divisions in the early 1940s,[8][9] the diversified multinational conglomerate entered the education market.[10] It acquired the textbook publisher Longman in 1968.[10]
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pearson plc divested further from a number of its industries and acquired more educational publishing companies, and its education publishing operations became steadily larger and more significant.[8][11] In 1988 Pearson plc purchased Addison-Wesley, the sixth-largest publisher of textbooks in the U.S.,[12] and merged it with Pearson's educational books subsidiary Longman to create Addison-Wesley Longman.[13][11] In 1996, it acquired HarperCollins Educational Publishing and merged it with Addison-Wesley Longman.[14]
Marjorie Scardino, who was CEO of Pearson plc from 1997 to 2013, increasingly focused the conglomerate on education and on making education acquisitions.[15][16] In 1998, Pearson plc purchased the education division of Simon & Schuster, which included Prentice Hall, Allyn & Bacon,[17][18] and parts of Macmillan Inc. including the Macmillan name.[19][20] Later in 1998 it merged Simon & Schuster's educational business with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education.[1]
Pearson Education sold and divested most of its Simon & Schuster divisions in 1999.[21] It sold Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division it operated under the Scott Foresman imprint, to RCL Benziger in 2007.[22] In 2007 Pearson Education sold the Macmillan name to Holtzbrinck Publishing Group,[19][20] which had purchased Macmillan Publishing Ltd. in the late 1990s.[23]
In 2000 Pearson acquired Virtual University Enterprises, an electronic testing company founded in 1994, and renamed it Pearson VUE.[24] According to the company, as of 2023, it delivers numerous skills tests and certification tests electronically in over 180 countries.[25][26]
Pearson Education was rebranded as simply Pearson in 2011,[3] and split into Pearson North America and Pearson International.[27] A restructuring announced in 2013 combined Pearson North America and Pearson International into one Pearson company[28] organised around three global lines of business: School, Higher Education, and Professional.[29][30]
Following the sale of its financial news publications Financial Times and The Economist in 2015, Pearson plc rebranded in January 2016 to focus solely on education, and the corporation adopted a new logo.[4] The logo is the unconventional symbol known as the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, and the logo is meant to convey a "combination of excitement, curiosity and individuality"[4] and "the excitement and fun of learning".[31]
In 2019, Pearson announced it would begin the process of phasing out the publishing of printed textbooks, in a plan to move into a more digital first strategy.[6]E-textbooks will be updated frequently, while printed books will be updated less often.[6] Students wanting printed books will need to rent them.[6] As of 2019, the firm received more than half of its annual revenues from digital sales,[6] and the US accounted for 20 percent of Pearson's annual revenue coming from courseware.[6]
In 2019, Pearson sold its US K-12 courseware business to the private equity firm Nexus Capital Management,[32][33] which rebranded it as Savvas Learning Company.[34][35] In 2019, Pearson also sold its remaining 25% stake in Penguin Random House to Bertelsmann.[36]
InformIT, a subsidiary of Pearson Education, is an online book vendor and an electronic publisher of technology and education content. It is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.[42]
InformIT.com is one of the websites of the Pearson Technology Group,[43] and one of several sites in the InformIT Network.[44] The site features free articles, blogs, and podcasts on IT topics and products, as well as a bookstore carrying all titles from its imprints.[44]
Other sites in the InformIT Network include Peachpit.com.[43]Peachpit is a publisher that has been producing books on graphic design, desktop publishing, multimedia, web design and development, digital video, and general computing since 1986.[44] Peachpit is a publishing partner for Adobe, Apple, Macromedia, and others.[44]
In 2001, the Pearson Technology Group and O'Reilly Media LLC formed a joint partnership called Safari Books Online, to offer a web-based electronic library of technical and business books from InformIT's imprint partners and O'Reilly Media.[45] The InformIT Network offers access to this service via its web sites.[46] Pearson sold its interest in Safari Books Online to O'Reilly in 2014.[47]
In 2006, Pearson School Systems, a division of Pearson Education, acquired PowerSchool, a student information system, from Apple; terms of the deal were not disclosed.[49] PowerSchool was a profitable product for Pearson; in 2014, it generated $97 million in revenue and $20 million in operating income.[50] In 2015, Pearson sold PowerSchool to Vista Equity Partners for $350 million cash.[50]
In 2007, the company developed the youth-oriented online quest game Poptropica, through its Family Education Network. In 2015, Pearson's Family Education Network, along with Poptropica, were sold to the London-based investment group Sandbox Partners.[51]
In 2016, Pearson acquired StatCrunch, a statistical analysis tool created by Webster West in 1997. Pearson had already been the primary distributor of StatCrunch for several years.[57]
Partnerships
In 2007, Pearson partnered with four other higher-education publishers to create CourseSmart, a company developed to sell college textbooks in eTextbook format on a common platform.[58] In 2011, Pearson obtained a five-year, $32million contract with the New York State Department of Education to design tests for students in grades 3–8.[59]
Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson based out of Seattle, partnered with AARP in 2014 to develop and add to a series of technology books for seniors.[60] The series, which includes My iPad For Seniors, and My Social Media for Seniors, are large-print and colourful.[60]
Errors in tests
In the spring of 2012, tests that Pearson designed for the NYSED were found to contain over 30 errors, which caused controversy. One of the most prominent featured a passage about a talking pineapple on the 8th Grade ELA test (revealed to be based on Daniel Pinkwater's The Story of the Rabbit and the Eggplant, with the eggplant changed into a pineapple). After public outcry, the NYSED announced it would not count the questions in scoring.[61] Other errors included a miscalculated question on the 8th Grade Mathematics test regarding astronomical units, a 4th grade math question with two correct answers, errors in the 6th grade ELA scoring guide, and over twenty errors on foreign-language math tests.[62]
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. It has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the Germany-based media conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC.
Bloomsbury Publishing plc is a British worldwide publishing house of fiction and non-fiction. Bloomsbury's head office is located in Bloomsbury, an area of the London Borough of Camden. It has a US publishing office located in New York City, an India publishing office in New Delhi, an Australian sales office in Sydney CBD, and other publishing offices in the UK, including in Oxford. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index.
Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initially owning 53% of the joint venture, and Pearson PLC initially owning the remaining 47%. Since 18 December 2019, Penguin Random House has been wholly owned by Bertelsmann.
Pearson plc is a multinational corporation, headquartered in the UK, focused on educational publishing and services.
Simon & Schuster LLC is an American publishing company owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. As of 2017 Simon & Schuster was the third largest publisher in the United States, publishing 2,000 titles annually under 35 different imprints.
Macmillan Publishers is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the firm would soon establish itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian era children's literature, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).
Addison–Wesley is an American publisher of textbooks and computer literature. It is an imprint of Pearson plc, a global publishing and education company. In addition to publishing books, Addison–Wesley also distributes its technical titles through the O'Reilly Online Learning e-reference service. Addison–Wesley's majority of sales derive from the United States (55%) and Europe (22%).
Harcourt was an American publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for adults and children. The company was last based in San Diego, California, with editorial/sales/marketing/rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida, and was known at different stages in its history as Harcourt Brace, & Co. and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. From 1919 to 1982, it was based in New York City.
Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner on March 31, 2006. Its headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Hachette is considered one of the "big five" publishing companies, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. In one year, HBG publishes approximately 1400+ adult books, 300 books for young readers, and 450 audiobook titles. In 2017, the company had 167 books on the New York Times bestseller list, 34 of which reached No. 1.
Prentice Hall was a major American educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. In its last few years it was owned by, then absorbed into, Savvas Learning Company. In the Web era, it distributed its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service for some years.
William Heinemann Ltd., with the imprint Heinemann, was a London-based publisher founded in 1890 by William Heinemann. Their first published book, 1890's The Bondman, was a huge success in the United Kingdom and launched the company. He was joined in 1893 by Sydney Pawling. Heinemann died in 1920 and Pawling sold the company to Doubleday, having worked with them in the past to publish their works in the United States. Pawling died in 1922 and new management took over. Doubleday sold his interest in 1933.
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group is an American independent academic publishing company founded in 1949. Under several imprints, the company offers scholarly books for the academic market, as well as trade books. The company also owns the book distributing company National Book Network based in Lanham, Maryland.
Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Random House, is an American publisher best known for its Complete Idiot's Guides series. It began as a division of Macmillan. Pearson Education acquired Macmillan General Reference (MGR) from Simon & Schuster in 1998 and retained Complete Idiot's Guides while the rest of MGR was sold to IDG Books. Alpha moved from Pearson Education to Penguin Group in 2003. Alpha became part of sister company DK in 2012.
Peachpit is a publisher of books focused on graphic design, web design, and development. Peachpit's parent company is Pearson Education, which owns additional educational media brands including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, and New Riders.
Macmillan Inc. was an American book publishing company originally established as the American division of the British Macmillan Publishers. The two were later separated and acquired by other companies, with the remnants of the original American division of Macmillan present in McGraw-Hill Education's Macmillan/McGraw-Hill textbooks, Gale's Macmillan Reference USA division, and some trade imprints of Simon & Schuster that were transferred when both companies were owned by Paramount Communications.
Benjamin Cummings is a publishing imprint of Pearson Education that specializes in science. Benjamin Cummings publishes medical textbooks, anatomy and physiology laboratory manuals, biology and microbiology textbooks, and health/kinesiology textbooks.
Perseus Books Group was an American publishing company founded in 1996 by investor Frank Pearl. Perseus acquired the trade publishing division of Addison-Wesley in 1997.
Silver Burdett was an American primary education textbook publishing imprint previously operated by Pearson Education, which is a division of media conglomerate Pearson PLC. The trademark was last owned by Savvas Learning Company.
Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
↑ "InformIT Promotions". informit.com. Retrieved 14 September 2023. 2023 Pearson Education, InformIT. All rights reserved. 800 East 96th Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46240
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