Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, has announced the acquisition of US-based digital content products and technologies provider, ebrary. The agreement will marry both companies' inventive, user-centric technologies and add a growing pool of a quarter-million e-books to ProQuest's monumental content offerings. The combined collection will enable users to search seamlessly across multiple formats - books, journals, dissertations, newspapers, video, and more - and across eight centuries of the world's knowledge.
ebrary is a fast growing leader in the rapidly evolving e-book industry, having increased its 2010 revenue by more than 30 percent over the previous year. Keys to its success are its flexible models including subscription, perpetual access, and patron-driven acquisition; a growing selection of digital books and other valuable content from some 500 of the world's top publishers; and cutting-edge technology including InfoTools and DASH!.
ProQuest plans continued investment in ebrary's popular products and services for the academic, corporate, and public library markets including Academic Complete the company's flagship product. Academic Complete is noted as one of the best e-book values in the industry with multi-user access to more than 52,000 titles. ProQuest will also expand ebrary's selection of research tools and ability to support new e-book devices as well as broadening language coverage from its current support of major European languages to include Chinese, Arabic and others. Further, the company will accelerate the indexing of e-book content on its own all-new platform where books offered by ebrary will be searchable along with ProQuest's highly-sought research content. Ultimately, as part of the ProQuest family, ebrary will be positioned to drive new levels of e-book discovery and usage, enhancing value for both publishers and end-users.
ebrary founders Christopher Warnock and Kevin Sayar will remain to lead the business in its Palo Alto headquarters.
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