"The 39 Clues takes creative leaps to expand the story experience from the pages of the books to multiple stages of discovery and imagination," Spielberg said in a statement. According to Variety, Spielberg is expected to select a screenwriter in the next several weeks.

Along with 10 planned books in the series, 355 collectible cards will be available (the print run for the first card pack has also doubled to 500,000), and children will be able to participate in an online game on the 39 Clues Web site. The program, which launches globally on September 9, will unfold over the next two years. Scholastic will be giving away more than $100,000 in prizes in conjunction with the series. The winner of a $10,000 grand prize will be chosen from among those who find all 39 clues.

In addition to writing The Maze of Bones, Riordan outlined the story arc for the entire series, which follows members of the Cahill family as they try to determine the source of their family's power following the death of their matriarch. The second book, One False Note by Gordon Korman, will follow in December, with the next titles to be written by Peter Lerangis, Jude Watson and Patrick Carman.  

Internationally famous mouse detective Geronimo Stilton.

The publishing division recently secured the rights to its first property, the animated series Code Lyoko, from French animation house Moonscoop (which is Atlantyca's partner on the Geronimo Stilton TV series). "Developing a property for a book is different from developing it for television," says Claudia Mazzucco, Atlantyca's CEO, who views Atlantyca's publishing properties as books in their own right and not as tie-ins. "A book is a book. It's like a new property," she says. Mazzucco notes that the graphic look is different for books than for television, the stories are longer, deeper and more internal—the reader can get into the characters' head, unlike on television—and the book lives independently and often longer. The new division ultimately plans to develop and publish 50 titles per year.   

“[USA Today] is a good source of information for a wide variety of people, from very educated and informed readers who want something easy to digest, to readers who like to get most of their information from USA Today,” said Adam Lerner, president and publisher, Lerner Publishing Group. “We’ve always prided ourselves on being that for our school library audience, where we also reach a wide variety of readers.” He points out that the paper’s colorful visuals and easily digestible bits of information parallel Lerner’s style. 

“This is an extension of our existing mission to get our content in front of kids in an educational setting,” said Christy Hartsell, USA Today’s director of brand licensing. “And, as a brand, we want to expose kids to USA Today early on.”  

While stressing the continuing importance of Walker's high-quality publishing, McAleer also cited the company's plans for diversification. "We want to be able to offer our authors and illustrators something different; hence we have set up Walker Productions to develop TV projects from our own properties, and are looking to work with partners on these projects." Walker will also relaunch its Web site to include space for children and adults to engage with the Walker authors and illustrators, and to develop e-commerce.

Bloomsbury Alum Opens Bookshop

Mainstreet Trading Company, a new children's bookshop, opened its door to a flood of local children and parents last Saturday. Situated in a converted auction house in St Boswells in the Scottish Borders, Mainstreet Trading carries a large stock of children's books within a comfortable space for browsing and reading and with a café on site. The emphasis of the shop is on knowledgeable and personalized customer service; it will also provide a venue for author events. Owner managers Rosamund de la Hey, formerly children's marketing director at Bloomsbury (where she oversaw the Harry Potter marketing campaigns), and her husband Bill, photographer and chef, have used their combined expertise to create a center to celebrate and sell children's books. —Julia Eccleshare

In keeping with Barefoot's picture book list, the new fiction line will focus on stories that draw from various cultures and traditions, but which, as Barefoot's co-founder and editor-in-chief Tessa Strickland puts it, "speak to our times." Illustration will also play a prominent role in the fiction list. "We place a high value on art as well as story, and on the importance of the visual education of older children," she says. "So the novels will be illustrated throughout in full color."

Little Leap Forward, which features art by Helen Cann, is a collaboration by flautist Guo Yue and Clare Farrow, a freelance writer and journalist, who live in London with their two children. They also teamed up to write an adult book, Music, Food and Love, a memoir of Guo Yue's life that was published in 2006 and is due out in paperback from Piatkus Books in December. Told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy, Little Leap Forward describes how the descent of the Red Guards on Beijing during the summer of 1966 brought drastic changes to the life of this child, who had previously spent his days flying kites with his friends and playing his flute to his beloved bird.  

As a professional actor who has spent many hours performing children's theater, I couldn't help but be excited when a galley of Acting Out crossed my desk. Too often I've seen (or been part of) stale retellings of fairytales and fables, dumbed-down productions of The Children's Hour or Our Town. And all too often I've seen kids lose interest in seeing the same material over and over again, removing the dynamism prevalent in good theater and making their introduction to drama a dull one. The idea of one-act plays written by established authors with middle-grade children in mind seemed a new and interesting way to introduce kids to theater as a form of both literature and performance-based art.

For Chanda, the idea for this project grew out of his own experiences reading scripts as a child. "I had basically grown up reading plays but there were no plays for kids," he says. "There was nothing middle-grade-based or written for that age range, [but] I was reading plays because I thought they were fun reads." In describing some of the original resistance to the concept of Acting Out, Chanda shared that, at the time, many people thought the projject wouldn't have wide appeal. "What if the kid's not into theater?" he recalls being asked. But with the blossoming of the YA genre to include alternative types of literature, including graphic novels and novels in verse, Chanda began to see this attitude dissipate.   

The author invites fans to “remix” the book in a variety of ways, such as converting the text to e-book formats for their favorite e-book readers, creating movie trailers or other projects. “For me—for pretty much every writer—the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity,” Doctorow says in the FAQ section of his Web site. “Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.”

Doctorow is the first author to release novels under license with Creative Commons; the license for Little Brother allows for noncommercial distribution and adaptation of the work as long as credit for the original work is given (cover art, however, is Tor’s property and is not permitted to be adapted or reused). Over a dozen user-submitted e-book formats (from Palm eReaders to iPhones to Texas Instruments calculators) are available on Doctorow’s site, and other “remixes” include a folded paper jar that includes the complete text of the book and a Google map that plots Little Brother landmarks.   

“Don’t make it sound sad,” Haslet told Bookshelf with a lilt in her voice that’s been there since she reached her decision. She’s looking forward to her retirement on June 30, as planned, and hoping to avoid liquidating inventory. She’s been able to fill orders despite letting the stock dwindle.

Although Haslet will be gone, several college students who want to have a party to celebrate the August 2 release of Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer’s fourth book in the Twilight Saga, will keep it going. The store will be open through the first week of August.

But sometimes last-minute interventions are not enough. That’s the case with Ventura, Calif.-based Adventures for Kids, which will close at the end of July. “It was kind of 11th hour when I bought it,” says former chef Barbara O’Grady, who purchased the store in 2006 from founder Jody Fickes Shapiro. “I could not find any financing. I was buying it more from an emotional point of view than a financial point of view. Basically I’ve been bringing in $300 a day and I need $1200.”