STM publisher Springer is providing online access to its historic German-language titles in addition to those in English, adding another 28,000 eBooks to the Springer Book Archives (SBA). These books are part of the SBA project in which books dating right back to 1842 – when the publishing company was founded – are being digitised and made available again for the scientific community.
The first 37,000 English-language titles were launched at the end of January at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Seattle. All together, there are 65,000 books now available in the Springer Book Archives via SpringerLink (link.springer.com).
By the end of the year, an unprecedented collection containing around 100,000 historic, scholarly eBooks in English and German will be available in full. Researchers, students and librarians will be able to access the full text of these books free of any digital rights management. Springer also offers a print-on-demand option for most of the books.
Notable authors whose works Springer has published include high-level researchers and Nobel laureates, such as Werner von Siemens, Hans Prinzhorn, Marie Curie and Max Born. Their publications will be a valuable addition to this historic online archive.
When complete there will be roughly equal numbers of titles in English and German in the SBA. The archives include around 50 different imprints, the majority of which are scientific publications, reflecting Springer's long publishing tradition. Some well-known specialist book imprints include the long-standing engineering publisher Vieweg (now SpringerVieweg), the economics portfolio of Gabler (now SpringerGabler), the U.S. computer book publisher Apress and the U.S. science publisher Copernicus.
