Whats New... Publishing and Book News

Guardians of Ga’Hoole Series No. 14 - War of the Ember, by Kathryn Lasky

ISBN 9780439888097, RRP$8.99, PB,

Horrible Histories Gory Stories Series, by Terry Deary

RRP$14.99, PB,

A brand new series of humorous stories, with the usual mix of comic characters and foul fun. In his quest to show children that history was made by real people, doing real and often horribly obnoxious things, Terry Deary has a new range of books, but this time they are fiction. The stories each centre on a young person who gets caught up in some major historical event, and through their adventures the reader finds out a lot about life at the time. For readers aged 7-11.

ISBN 9781407102962 Tomb of Treasure (About grave robbers and King Tut).
ISBN 9781407103334 Wall of Woe (Set in ancient England along the wall keeping back the Picts).
ISBN 9781407103471 Tower of Terror (Struggling to make a living in Tudor London).
ISBN 9781407103662 Shadow of the Gallows (A plot to kill Queen Victoria enmeshes a young chimney sweep).

Children’s Books by Superstar Authors

With a new book in the English Roses series by Madonna out recently, (Big Sister Blues, ISBN 9780141383828), the debate is on again about whether pop-star celebrities should be writing children’s books. Are they any good at writing? Does it matter? Certainly the English Roses series is very popular, and Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl Princess in 2006 was as well, with its gorgeous pictures and colours. After all, successful pop stars are creative and imaginative people, and are more than likely to have a range of artistic talents. John Lennon of ‘The Beatles’, for instance, started out as an art student, before the band became famous.

The 2008 KOALA Awards were announced in October 2008. The winners are:

Storylands Fantastic Forest Series

A brand new series of early reading books published by Blake Education. There are 30 books altogether in the fiction set, all with bright illustrations of the fantasy land in which the stories are set. The style is reminiscent of the Shrek movies, with green monsters, fabled creatures and spooky forests.

The little paperbacks come in three levels, Emergent, Early and Early-Fluent. They are aimed at a reading ages from 5-8. Older children who find reading difficult will be able to select one of the Emergent level titles, but still be reading books that look very similar to those their more competent friends are reading. As any literacy teacher knows, self confidence, and not being offered ‘baby books’ go a long way to helping the child with reading difficulties to improve.

Full text from Google

Google has negotiated an agreement with US publishers and libraries for the display of the full text of out-of-print books, even ones that are still under copyright. At present, the agreement does not extend to books published in Australia, but it will apply to the US edition of an Australian book, if one is available. The deal with libraries is currently only applicable in the USA.

Coming soon to our website…

Educational Concepts is currently updating some of the features of our ordering pages to make them more user friendly. Look for these changes which are either already implemented, or are coming soon:

• A greatly expanded list of links to series from our Series drop down search box
• A new form for ordering books which were not found when searching our products database. This form will be accessed from a link which will appear when you have entered details in the Search Criteria box, and no record was found.

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