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Chances are, at some point in your life, you've read something from Scholastic publishing. Perhaps in your school days you skimmed one of their magazines or bought a book at one of their books fairs. "Harry Potter," check. "Hunger Games," check. Both Scholastic. From its humble beginnings as the publisher of a magazine for high schoolers, Scholastic has become a $2 billion business and one of the biggest children's book publishers in the world.
NPR's Lynn Neary has this profile.
LYNN NEARY, BYLINE: As the school year drew to a close at Powell will Elementary, a bilingual public school in Washington, D.C., school librarian Christine Stoessel organized the second Scholastic book fair of the year.
CHRISTINE STOESSEL: You're going to buy the vet book?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Mm-hmm. And I get like, other one free, I know.
STOESSEL: OK, let's find you a free one. Let's see.
NEARY: Stoessel used profits from the first one to buy books for the library. This one was a buy one, get one free special.
STOESSEL: Let's see, do you need some help counting this out.
KLEIBER CASTANON: Yeah.
STOESSEL: All right.
NEARY: Third grader Kleiber Castanon had a big stack of books and a pile quarters to pay for them.
CASTANON: My dad gave them to me.
NEARY: He gave you all those quarters to buy books? You love to read?
CASTANON: Yes.
NEARY: So what books did you get? What are your favorite kinds of books?
CASTANON: (unintelligible)
NEARY: Scholastic is a leader in the school book fair business. It partners with schools and takes a portion of the profits. Book fairs are a crucial part of Scholastic because the company built its business in schools. Dick Robinson is chairman and CEO of Scholastic.
DICK ROBINSON: If you think of Scholastic, it's a relationship company with teachers and parent and kids. And it succeeded by going on from generation to generation.
NEARY: Scholastic was founded by Dick Robinson's father, M.R. Robinson. In 1920, he set up an office in his mother's sewing room and published a four-page magazine distributed in 50 high schools. More magazines followed. And in the 1940s, Scholastic introduced book clubs into schools. By the time Dick Robinson took over as CEO in 1974, Scholastic was a respected educational publisher.
ROBINSON: What I noticed was that everybody knew Scholastic, in part because of the magazines but also because of the book clubs. So it seemed to me that the company had a great reputations but it didn't have quite as much outreach.
NEARY: Robinson set out to build the company's brand. And by the late 1970s, Scholastic had created an entertainment division that was turning out TV shows based on its popular books.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, "CLIFFORD THE BIG RED DOG")
NEARY: And while in-school publications were still thriving, the company got more and more into selling popular books. The trade division began churning out best-selling series like "Goosebumps" and "The Baby Sitters Club."
Ellie Berger, president of the trade publishing group at Scholastic, says they built their success on their experience in the classroom.
ELLIE BERGER: Well, I think it was leveraging the opportunity that Scholastic had in understanding what kids really wanted to read and taking those books and those ideas and making them available everywhere where kids were consuming books.
NEARY: At this point a certain boy wizard flew their way. Ellie Berger says no one really understood what publishing the "Harry Potter" series in the U.S. would mean.
BERGER: I think we knew we had a great book in our hands. We knew it was a story that surely we could relate to. There was immediately a lot of excitement around the book. But I don't think we had any idea of what it would actually become.
NEARY: Following closely on the heels of "Harry Potter" came another mega hit, "The Hunger Games," a best-selling series that turned into a blockbuster after the movie based on it was made.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "THE HUNGER GAMES")
NEARY: The wild success of "Harry Potter" and "The Hunger Games" had a huge impact on children's publishing, says Elise Howard of Algonquin Books for Young Readers. She says even Scholastic's competitors benefited from their success.
ELISE HOWARD: One thing scholastic and companies that have published other children's and YA hits have demonstrated, is that this is serious business and this is seriously profitable business.
NEARY: But the success of its trade publishing and entertainment divisions seemed to overshadow its less glamorous educational ventures. Not so, says Marjorie Mayer, president of Scholastic Education.
MARJORIE MAYER: I think it's an education company 100 percent.
NEARY: Mayer says just as the trade publishing and entertainment divisions of Scholastic were growing, so was its educational wing.
MAYER: We have really smart people on fire about helping kids read. And everybody, everybody at Scholastic believes that every kid can read well and that being a good reader is part of life.
NEARY: Jumping feet first into the digital world, Scholastic began working on technology-driven reading programs. The result was Read 180 for struggling readers, a huge success for the company which recently introduced a new program, iRead, for kids who are learning to read.
(SOUNDBITE OF IREADER)
DAVID PEARSON: I often end up as a competitor being envious that they got to market with a good research-based, effective idea before I did.
NEARY: David Pearson is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkley who has published his own educational programs with a different company. Pearson says the education community is often critical of some of the commercial educational programs on the market because they feel they depend more on market research than educational research. But he says Scholastic's work is generally well received.
PEARSON: Clearly, they are driven by market forces. But I think they also pay a lot of attention to the latest research, particularly in their field on language and literacy learning. But like any good entrepreneurial American company, they're out to make a buck.
NEARY: Scholastic may be out to make a buck but the company also says it is committed to worldwide literacy. It's a heady goal, which Dick Robinson says dovetails perfectly with the business of selling kids books.
ROBINSON: I don't think there is a conflict in any way between our mission and our business. In fact, they're united together in the necessity, really, of children acquiring reading skills, learning more about the world and learning more about themselves through reading.
NEARY: Robinson says Scholastic has hewed closely to his father's original goal, to help people understand society and how it works. He says his father wanted to do that more than he wanted make money. The fact that Scholastic is now worth billions is just an added bonus.
Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
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