ebrary®, a leading provider of eContent services and technology, today announced that Duke University Press has licensed its platform to host and deliver a new eBook product, the e-Duke Scholarly Books Collection. The new product is due to be fully released in January 2009, with a pilot program taking place during the 2008 year for a limited number of library partners. Using the ebrary platform, Duke will distribute the new collection directly to the academic library community under a perpetual access model.
“Duke University Press chose the ebrary platform for a number of reasons: It supports multiple business models including subscription and perpetual access, offers rich functionality such as InfoTools, personal bookshelves, and multiple search options, and is highly affordable and reliable,” said Steve Cohn, Director of Duke University Press. “Additionally, we are able to easily submit our eBooks into the ebrary platform through the web-ready PDFs supplied to us by the University of Chicago Press’s BiblioVault program. Since ebrary’s technology is available as a hosted service, we do not have to invest in additional resources to build and maintain the system.”
“Duke University Press is at the forefront of university presses in making its scholarship available electronically, and we are very excited that it chose our platform to host and deliver its new eBook product,” said Monica Nogueira, ebrary’s Global Director of Business Development. “ebrary has long been aggregating content from leading publishers and distributing it to libraries under multiple models. We are extremely pleased that innovative publishers like Duke are now licensing the same ebrary platform to sell and market their own content directly to libraries and other markets.”
Key features and benefits of the ebrary platform include the following:
* Ability to distribute digital content under multiple business models (subscription, perpetual access, pay-per-use)
* “Browse-before-buy” capabilities
* Full text searching and indexing – No need for complex XML or meta tagging PDF files
* Easy PDF submission
* ebrary InfoTools™ provide contextual linking across multiple online resources
* The ebrary Reader™ delivers eBooks page-by-page online, eliminating cumbersome document downloads
* Personal bookshelves
* Highlighting and annotating
* Copying and printing with an automatic citation and URL hyperlink back to the source
In a separate press release issued today, Gibson Library Connections, a leading supplier of eBooks to the Canadian library market, announced that it has significantly grown its business since licensing the ebrary platform. The press release is available at http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_Gibson_platform.pdf.
For more information about the ebrary platform, please email platform@ebrary.com.
About Duke University Press
Duke University Press is the publishing arm of Duke University. The Press publishes cutting-edge books and journals, primarily in the humanities and interpretive social sciences, as well as books intended for a general audience. For more information, please visit www.dukeupress.edu.
About ebrary (www.ebrary.com)
ebrary® is a leading provider of eContent services and technology. The company helps libraries, publishers, and other organizations disseminate valuable information to end users, while improving their research and document interaction.
The company has developed a flexible eContent platform, which customers may use in a number of different, integrated capacities: ebrary customers may purchase or subscribe to eBooks and other content under a variety of pricing and access models, and they may license the ebrary platform to distribute, sell, and market their own content online. All options are delivered using a customizable interface and include the ebrary Reader™ with InfoTools™ software, which enable integration with other resources to provide an economical and efficient way to utilize information.
ebrary currently offers a growing selection of more than 120,000 eBooks and other titles from more than 260 leading publishers and aggregators.
For four consecutive years, ebrary has been named to the EContent 100 list of “companies that matter most” in the digital content industry.
Founded in 1999, ebrary is privately held and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA.