With the publication of Madonna's much-hyped children's book, The English Roses (Las Rosas Inglesas), Scholastic is launching a Spanish-language imprint, Scholastic En Espanol. According to the press release, Hispanics currently account for 17% of all children in the United States and by 2005, Latinos will constitute 25% of the U.S. population. The imprint will include translations of Clifford, Captain Underpants, and Goosebumps books, as well as original Spanish-language titles.

Here's the press release.

Scholastic has no Spanish-language Web content just yet, but I would imagine the RFPs are out right now. It's also unclear if the imprint will use include the tilde over the n. The press release left the tilde off of "Espanol." Accented characters are just one of the challenges English-only speakers encounter as they begin working with different languages. For starters, it's not clear how to even create these characters. To compound matters, URLs currently don't support accented characters (though that will change).

Consider the CNN Spanish site. The URL is http://cnnenespanol.com while the page includes the tilde, as shown here: