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At a Penguin media event hosted by Penguin Group Chairman and CEO John Makinson, Penguin Group made three major announcements today at the London Book Fair.  Reuters, CNN Money, The Guardian (UK) and Publishers Lunch have already published stories on these announcements.  Links to this immediate and very positive press coverage are further below.

Penguin Group Is First International Publisher to Sign eBooks Distribution Agreement to make eBook Titles in English Available in China

Penguin Group is the first international publishing company to sign a distribution agreement to make its front and backlist English titles available in e-Book form to readers in China. This agreement is with Beijing-based Founder Apabi Group.  Penguin e-Book titles from the UK and Dorling Kindersley will be made available in Apabi's Chinese e-Book (CEB) format.  Starting in May 2009, titles will be available in English for download to Chinese readers, including a wide range of fiction, nonfiction, classics, children's, lifestyle, and travel books. 

John Makinson commented: "We are excited to be signing this landmark agreement with Founder Apabi. For Penguin, both the Chinese market and the digital arena represent areas of great opportunity and future growth, and in Apabi we believe we have found the right partner to develop our e-Book offering. We look forward to using our relationship with Apabi as a springboard for a range of digital projects over the coming years."

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So what is it about puzzles, anyway? Why do I solve them every day and why am I working so diligently to convert kids to a lifetime of puzzle love with my Winston Breen books?

There are a few reasons I could throw at you. There’s my general fascination with words, and how they can be bent and shaped and turned into curlicues. Who can fail to adore the fact that the letters of ONE PLUS TWELVE can be scrambled to make the mathematically equivalent sentence, TWO PLUS ELEVEN? Don’t tell me that is not as awesome as a fireworks display.

So there’s that, my ceaseless love of wordplay.

But stronger than that is my love of the Aha! moment.

In my last post, I talked about some puzzles you can create for your kids. What I didn’t say is that your children may not solve them quite as quickly as you created them. They might struggle a little. What you’ve handed them will at first look like nonsense: A bunch of letters all mashed together. Or maybe not even that. The Pigpen code, at first glance, is just a lot of squiggly lines.

Watch your child as he or she tries that first puzzle, which is called an Anaquote. The solver has to scramble the columns of letters so that they spell a message reading across the rows. This may not be an automatic thing for a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old to do. In my sample puzzle, I don’t indicate spaces between the words, and some words start on one line but wrap to the next. That’s not quite how a kid normally reads.

» P.W. Singer discusses his book, which looks at the current trends in combat robotics and whether or not the future could bring autonomous robots.

» Listen to other Penguin Podcasts.

» Read more about Wired for War.

P.W. Singer, Wired for War, Podcast