Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing

From the beginning, the two founding entrepreneurs approached the business in a much different manner than their more buttoned- down colleagues along Publishers Row. The history of S&S is marked by numerous significant industry “firsts.” Dick Simon and Max Schuster were aggressive marketers, often spending five to ten times more for advertising and promotion than their competitors: they were the first publisher to offer booksellers the privilege of returning unsold copies for credit; they were the first to apply mass market production and distribution techniques to books, and in 1939, with Robert Fair de Graff, launched the paperback revolution with the founding of Pocket Books, America’s first paperback publisher. In 1945, they published the first “instant book.” And in 2000, Simon & Schuster became the first publisher to offer an original work by a major author exclusively in electronic form with the publication of Stephen King’s eBook Riding the Bullet, a worldwide publishing and media phenomenon.