Pelican books take flight again

  “Who would have imagined that, even at 6d, there was a thirsty public
   anxious to buy thousands of copies of books on science, sociology, economics,
   archaeology, astronomy and other equally serious subjects?”

  [....]

  Editions of 50,000, even for not obvious bestsellers, were standard [....]
  (These days a publisher would be delighted if such a book made it to 2,000.) 

Sixpence in 1937 is about £1.50 (US$2.50) today. The new series sells for £8 ($13.50).

The co-founder of Pelican books, V. K. Krishna Menon, was a very important figure in Indian independence and a controversial diplomat and defence minister afterwards. He split with Allen Lane, I have heard, over a dispute over how commercial the venture should be - with Lane taking a more commercial viewpoint.

This story is so obscure that I have never found any reliable source for this. I am glad to see Guardian acknowledging the role of Krishna Menon in the history of Penguin books and Pelican books - it seems vague even in the Wikipedia article on Krishna Menon.

He also was pivotal in the non-aligned movement: what is now called the "third world". Originally the term denoted countries allied neither to the West nor to the Soviet Bloc, but now it has become synonymous with squalour.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_K_Krishna_Menon

So the news is, despite this thing called the Internet happening, and Wikipedia, and YouTube how-tos, and self-publishing becoming reputable and lo-capex, and most non-fiction on a slow downward trend, Penguin is going to reboot a non-fiction imprint, with conventional pricing and distribution, with books on the sort of topics one gets in TED Talks and free online university lectures. How does one pitch a business case for something like this?

I think those are all available for considerably less than £8. The non-scarcity of books has pretty much hung them here and that's a good thing.

Publishers sell books.

I just want the words and they're virtually free to distribute.