Dorling Kindersley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Dorling Kindersley | |
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| Type | |
| Founded | 1974 |
| Headquarters |  London, England, UK |
| Key people | Christopher Dorling,Peter Kindersley |
| Parent | Penguin Group, part of Pearson PLC |
| Website | www.dk.com |
Dorling Kindersley (DK) is an international publishing company specialising in illustrated reference books for adults and children in 51 languages.
Contents |
[edit] History
DK was founded as a book-packaging company by Christopher Dorling and Peter Kindersley in London in 1974, and in 1982 moved into publishing. The first book published under the DK name was a First Aid Manual for the British voluntary medical services; this book established the company's distinctive visual style of copiously illustrated text on a glossy white background. DK Inc. began publishing in the United States in 1991.
In 1999 DK printed 13 million copies of a book but only sold 3 million of them, leaving the company with crippling debt. As a direct result, DK was taken over the following year by the Pearson PLC media company, and made part of Penguin Group, which also owns the Penguin Books label.
[edit] Publications
DK publishes an extensive range of titles internationally for adults and children. Most of the company's books are produced by teams of editors and designers who work with freelance writers and illustrators. Some are endorsed by "imprimaturs": well-known and respected organizations such as the British Medical Association, the Royal Horticultural Society, and the British Red Cross. Many DK books apparently produced by celebrity authors such as Carol Vorderman are actually ghostwritten by the company's own writers and editors.
Popular titles that DK has published include The Way The Universe Works, The Way Science Works, and a series of large-format "visual guides" with such titles as Universe, Earth, Animal, Human, and History. Other successful book series published in the 1990's included Eyewitness and DK Superguides.
During the 1990s, the company also published educational videos and a successful range of educational CD-ROMs under the brand "DK Multimedia", during the late 1990s CD-ROMs were rebranded as "DK Interactive Learning" to reflect a changed emphasis toward the educational sector. The programs were written in C++ using a cross-platform software framework known internally as Penge (named after the South London suburb) and ran on Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh. The media data and scripts were compressed using a process called scrunging. The content screens were laid out on Macintosh using Quark XPress under System 7 (later OS8), and authored using a custom-created Xtension named 'XTauthor' through which the screens could be exported as 24bit PICT files (for subsequent palette optimisation into 8 bit DIB, GIFf or PNG format), and the authoring as an associated 'PAGE' file with .pag extension. The open architecture of the products prior to the scrunge procedure enabled relatively straightforward localisation for foreign publishers.
Following dwindling sales and increasing competition from websites, the company tried to rebrand the digital part of its business as "DK Online" before opting to sell it to an entirely separate company, Global Software Publishing (GSP), in 2000. Most of the remaining CD-ROM staff were made redundant during the acquisition of the company by Pearson PLC.
