The client

Penguin Books was originally founded in the UK in 1935 by Allen Lane, who envisioned a collection of quality, attractive books affordable enough to be “bought as easily and casually as a packet of cigarettes.” Today, Penguin Publishing Group is the largest division of Penguin Random House, Inc. It has more than 10,000 employees worldwide, with more than 5,000 employees in North America. It publishes 70,000 digital and 15,000 print titles annually, with more than 100,000 eBooks available worldwide. From publisher Penguin Random House, Penguin Young Readers unite the best authors, illustrators, and brands from the group under one umbrella.

The problem

www.penguinteen.com, features exclusive news, excerpts and cover reveals; exclusive videos and content from authors; “Reader Love”, a section that highlights submissions from fans and digital book influencers including Booktubers, Bloggers and Bookstagramers; and “Books You’ll Love,” a user-friendly book-finder tool that helps readers discover new books and authors.

But the website didn’t look modern because it was static and it was not responsive. And losing freshness is not good with a target audience of teenagers.

The solution

Element 14 was hired by Penguin Group USA via Ivory Digital to work on a new website. Our team got access to PRH’s private API in order to be able to access to the thousands of titles Penguin has available under the “young adult” section for the US market. This API recovers the details for each book, such as ISBN, title, and author.

Our first task was defining a secondary data structure able to map out and combine the information coming from the API with the look&feel attributes (background color, cover, etc) defined by the website administrators, and stored on a separate relational database.

The results

A dynamic website was achieved, showing information based on the internal catalogs of Penguin Teen. Likewise, it was one of the first responsive websites, with a mobile-first operation, and achieved the expected freshness for mobile-first teenagers.