Prentice Hall textbooks are developed and distributed by Pearson Education. Prentice Hall is a publishing imprint that Pearson education commonly uses. Prentice Hall is headquartered in the Upper Saddle River area of New Jersey. Prentice Hall textbooks are developed and distributed for use by students in grades six through twelve. Aside from their focus in these lower grades, they tend to focus on a lot of areas in the higher education marketplace. Fairly recently, Prentice Hall has been publishing some of their educational material in digital format alongside the traditional print format as well.
Prentice Hall textbooks got its official start underway in October of 1913. During this time, Dr. Charles Gerstenberg was a law professor that taught several students. One of these student’s names was Richard Ettinger. Gerstenberg and Ettinger used their mothers maiden names to officially name their new business. What were their mothers maiden names? You guessed it, their names were Prentice and Hall. The Prentice Hall textbooks business was officially bought by the corporation Gulf and Western in 1984. At this time, Prentice Hall was a division of the Simon & Schuster company. In the late 90s, the entire educational department of Simon & Schuster, along with Prentice Hall, was bought out by Pearson Education.
As a publishing company, Prentice Hall has had several extremely successful and popular textbook titles in the past decade. One of these popular titles is MacGruder’s American Government. This Prentice Hall textbook can be seen on the desks of classrooms throughout the US everyday. As far as the subject of science goes, they are the official textbook publisher of Biology by Ken Miller and Joe Levine as well. This textbook is utilized by students to assist them in understanding the intricacies of the natural world that we live in. It is a favorite among science educators throughout the United States and the rest of the world. Prentice Hall textbooks are also known and appreciated by educators for their high quality supplementary materials that integrate with the textbook material.
Prentice Hall seems to be focusing on providing digital content as of late. Looking at their past, this actually should not be too surprising. It seems that they have always had a large focus on technology and specifically personal computing. These topics would naturally lead to a focus on using the Internet as a distribution channel. Prentice Hall publishes the very popular computer programming textbook: The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. With the company’s increased focus on digital content distribution, it will certainly be interesting to see how Prentice Hall textbooks can help students achieve their academic goals in the future.