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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land I was surprised. late last year, when I discovered venerable publisher Scholastic selling video games during their annual book fair at my son’s elementary school. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one.
I received a relatively snippy email today from Scholastic vice president of corporate communications Kyle Good in response to our story about their upcoming book-meets-video-games series The 39 Clues. In the story I referenced the same paragraph of the New York Times that Ian Bogost referenced which said that the series was the publisher’s attempt to “create a branded franchise for which it owns all the rights” essentially cutting the writers out of future profits.
The veep was quick to point out that they never said that, rather that it was the New York Time’s interpretation of their series.
Your interpretation of the interpretation of the reporter at the New York Times does NOT reflect the feelings of anyone at Scholastic regarding J.K.Rowling. Quite the opposite, we are enormously proud to be her U.S. publisher.
Scholastic retains the rights to The 39 Clues because the project was developed in the Scholastic Lab for Informal Learning in conjunction with the company’s Trade publishing division as you can read in the attached press release. I suggest you use this as original source material.
Good call, though I still have never been a fan of publisher-driven projects, in any medium. And for the record, their interpretation of my interpretation of an interpretation; was actually an interpretation of my interpretation of an interpretation of interpretation…. wait what were we talking about again?
Gaming brainiac, and one-time Kotaku Editor fill-in, Ian Bogost points out that Scholastic, now in deep withdrawls from the Harry Potter series, has been casting about looking for new was to make billions of dollars. Their latest idea? A series called The 39 Clues which will feature ten books and be written by different authors including Gordon Korman and Rock Riordan.
The series seems to hint at the fact that it will include mention of video games and in fact have flash-based video game tie-ins.
