Simon & Schuster Joins Wordnik's Smartwords Initiative

SAN MATEO and PALOS VERDES, Calif., June 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Wordnik, a company creating new ways to unlock the value of digital content, announced today that Simon & Schuster has signed on as a Smartwords data partner, with the goal of adding great examples of word use from Simon & Schuster books to the world's largest dictionary. The announcement took place at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference, an annual gathering of the leaders of the digital revolution.

Simon & Schuster's content will help power Smartwords, a new initiative from Wordnik that will enable publishers to harness the fast-moving shift to digital content and encourage the development of new tools and applications. Designed to give readers the best explanation for any word exactly where and when they want it, Smartwords allows publishers to connect with readers and share their authoritative content in more useful, interactive and entertaining ways. Among the initial areas of focus for the open standard publishing initiative is to leverage new e-book and "pad" platforms to create a more personalized digital reading experience.

Wordnik CEO Erin McKean added, "Simon & Schuster's fantastic content will help us match readers with the best possible explanations for every word and help move e-books to the next stage of usefulness and engagement."

"We are committed to helping readers find Simon & Schuster's books in as many ways as possible, both online and off," said Elinor Hirschhorn, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Simon & Schuster. "So we're delighted that our titles will now be discoverable through Smartwords-enabled applications, a new and unique way that both provides context for words and how they are used, and exposes readers to the many world class authors that we publish at Simon & Schuster."

ABOUT SIMON & SCHUSTER

Simon & Schuster, a part of CBS Corporation, is a global leader in the field of general interest publishing, dedicated to providing the best in fiction and nonfiction for consumers of all ages, across all printed, electronic, and audio formats. Its divisions include Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, Simon & Schuster Audio, Simon & Schuster Digital, and international companies in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit our website at www.simonandschuster.com  

ABOUT SMARTWORDS

Smartwords will enable access to all forms of digital content using words as connectors. It benefits publishers and consumers alike by facilitating better, more personalized discovery of digital content. An open standard, Smartwords gives publishers, application developers and device manufacturers a lightweight, easy-to-use method for adding and sharing word data across the entire ecosystem of digital text, making digital content more compelling and valuable. Smartwords partners include: Audio Newspaper; Audiovox; Baen Books; Forbes; Huffington Post; Ibis Reader; IDG; IGN; Internet Archive; MetroLeap Media; The New York Times; NPR; O'Reilly Media; Scientific American; Scribd; Simon & Schuster; Six Apart; Vook; and Ziff Davis. Learn more at http://smartwords.wordnik.com.

ABOUT WORDNIK

Wordnik's mission is to gather as much information as possible about as many words as possible and to share that information with as many people as possible. The company has information for more than nine million English words. Founded by Erin McKean, the former editor in chief of The New Oxford American Dictionary, Wordnik's team includes experts in search engine architecture, social networking, computational linguistics and library science. For more information visit http://www.wordnik.com, follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/Wordnik), or email [email protected].

Media Contact: Pamela Mahoney, [email protected] 650-854-7236,

SOURCE Wordnik