Houghton Mifflin Company traces its history to 1832. Famous authors such as Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Twain and Thoreau were published by the company. In 2007, the company acquired Harcourt Education making the combined company the largest K-12 publisher globally. Despite such a strong brand and wide breadth in the publishing world, the company has had to find new revenue streams. Two new titles show the varied and dynamic strategies it is harnessing in order to survive and thrive.

The many Jeopardy! fans in the Kingdom must already be aware of the impending February match-up between all-time Jeopardy! winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and an IBM-engineered computer named Watson. On Jan. 26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) will release an updateable eBook, “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.” The eBook will reveal numerous details about Watson’s journey from lab to podium, except of course whether the computer will win the competition. The book’s last chapter, which divulges the winner and analyzes the match, will be released as a free update on Feb. 17, after the show’s finale airs.

In the competition, Watson will need to do more than churn through facts. The computer will have to understand language, including puns and irony, master topics from literature to science, along with game strategy. At its heart, the book, Final Jeopardy, is about the future of knowledge. What can we teach machines? What will Watson’s heirs be capable of in ten or twenty years? And what will be left for humans?

“Ninety-eight percent of the value of a book about this competition lies in the story behind the story — what IBM has done to advance artificial intelligence, what they’ve learned about the ideal interaction between humans and our machines — and only two percent in the news of whether or not Watson beats its human competitors,” said Bruce Nichols, SVP, HMH. “By releasing an eBook before the contest, and updating it afterward, readers can get the most out of this fascinating cultural moment as it unfolds, and as publishers, we can test out a new model for books about current events of lasting significance.”

HMH is also looking to create a new model for reference books. These are the titles which people turn to over and over again for information. HMH has long published the Peterson Field Guide series of nature guides. Under a licensing agreement with Appweavers, Inc., a development firm specializing in mobile apps, Peterson Birds of North America, an app based on the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America, is available now in the iTunes App Store. It will be followed by guides to mammals, reptiles and amphibians, and butterflies. All the apps will be based on books in the Peterson Field Guide series, but they will offer features impossible in print editions. The company hopes that if these prove popular there will be the potential for future expansion to the Android and Windows Phone platforms. To see a preview of the app, visit www.youtube.com/user/petersonguides.