October 15, 2012 | Jeremy Greenfield | 8 - DigitalBookWorld.com

Sales of children’s e-books made huge strides in the first half of the year even as growth in adult trade e-books slowed, according to the latest publishing sales numbers from the Association of American Publishers. Revenues for trade paperback books sagged, presumably losing sales to e-book buyers.
 
Revenues from children’s and young adult e-books were up to
$146.4 million in the first half of 2012, an increase of 252% over the same period last year. At the same time, adult trade e-books were up 34.4% in the first half, a marked slowdown from triple-digit growth a year earlier.

 Meanwhile, trade paperback sales are down about 20%, presumably losing sales to e-book buyers.
 
Overall, e-book sales accounted for about 25% of total trade sales, up to $768 million for the first half, an increase of 52% over the same period last year, according to Publishers Lunch.
 
From 2007 through 2011, e-book sales doubled or more every year. Digital growth at major trade publishing companies like Random House and Hachette — bellwethers for the industry — has slowed, too. Digital publishing revenues at both companies now represent 27% of total revenues, up from about 21% the year
before.
 
In June, adult trade e-book sales were up 48.3% to $119.9 million. Children’s e-book sales were up 130.8% in June, a slowdown that mirrors  The Hunger Games‘ slide from the top of the best-seller list. And religious e-book sales were up 4.5% in June to $4.6 million, basically flat compared to triple-digit growth numbers in the earlier part of the year.
 
In 2012, the AAP expanded the number of publishers queried to nearly 1,200 versus
about 90 in 2011. The report now also includes additional categories, like
children/young adult. The 2011 numbers have been backwards-engineered to include
the expanded data set.

Luis Prado has created what he hopes will become an international symbol for global warming.

“When I searched for a global warming icon, nothing appeared,” said Luis
Prado, a graphic designer who illustrates publications and creates interpretive signs at his job at the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. “So I made one.”

Two months ago, Mr. Prado learned about The Noun Project, created in 2010 as an online storehouse for “the world’s visual language.” Impressed with the open-source and visual nature of the project, he began designing and uploading icons he had created for his agency — a logging truck, a  pruning saw, a blackberry. The breadth of subjects quickly expanded: jealousy, impostor, shipwreck,
astronaut. “It’s become something of an obsession,” he said, noting that he had completed four new icons that very morning.

The project does not directly compensate designers for their work, but Mr. Prado now has 83 icons to his name. Recent news articles about climate change inspired the global warming symbol. Edward Boatman, co-founder of
The Noun Project, said he had not seen an image “truly representing the phenomenon” until now. “Luis has created an icon that is incredibly startling,” he said.

To begin, Mr. Prado plugged “global warming” into Google’s image search engine. The results including  depictions of an Earth on fire, melting glaciers and smokestacks, but nothing that matched his own vision. So he took a picture of the globe and “melted it” so that continents and oceans extruded glutinous drips. “Less is more,” Mr. Prado said. The icon has been downloaded over 100 times in the last week.

Although unsure how the icon might be used – Mr. Boatman hopes it will “become a rallying point for environmental protection and other green initiatives” – Mr. Prado said that he is interested in projects that serve the common good, in many cases those related to safety, natural resources or the environment. 

Still, those are permeable boundaries. “It occurred to me one day that there was no icon for centaur, so I made one.” Mr. Prado recently completed his first graphic novel, “julioh,” about a young Argentine immigrant who chases success in Manhattan advertising, a plot in some ways mirroring his own life. He hopes to find a publisher.

In the meantime, he continues to sketch icons. “When I started, I had hoped to upload one per day, giving me 365 after a year,” he said. “But then reality struck.”


Would any readers out there like to submit their own global warming icons?
Send your creations to greenblogs@nytimes.com, using the subject line “global
warming icon.”

Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders. Warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder, as an increasing body of science points to rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gases — produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and forests.

 Global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped by the largest amount on record in 2010, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery. Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010, according to the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of scientists. The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

Read more: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html#