Inkling Adds Deals With Wolters Kluwer, McGraw-Hill

Inkling, an online publishing platform, has entered into separate agreements with Wolters Kluwer Health and McGraw-Hill Education to use its digital authoring platform Inkling Habitat.

Wolters Kluwer will use Habitat to create more than a 100 bundles of print and digital content for a single price; while McGraw-Hill Ed has signed on to use Habitat to build native next-gen digital content coupled with adaptive learning technology.

In a phone call with Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis, he said the Wolters Kluwer had entered into a multi-year deal with Inkling that will produce Inkling e-book versions of nearly 100 of its print professional titles. Kluwers plans to offer bundles of these e-books with their print editions at a single price for both. The deal will feature both new and backlist titles, and the Inkling-produced e-books will be supported across all platforms. Titles include such professional works as The Anesthesiologist’s Manual of Surgical Procedures and Rockwood and Green’s Fractures in Adults and Children.

MacInnis said Wolters Kluwer is out to deliver e-books as well as print to a professional education marketplace shifting to digital content. The Wolters Kluwer program will include a use-code for any print title that is purchased, giving the consumer access to the digital version at the Inkling website. This means, explained Wolters Kluwer medical education publisher Michael Tully, that the company's practitioner customers "can now access our titles from virtually any device—mobile or otherwise—and use them anywhere they wish, even without an Internet connection."

McGraw-Hill, MacInnis explained, has a “more open-ended” agreement with Inkling, opting to use its Habitat platform to create native digital content that can work in tandem with its own “adaptive Learning” technology. Adaptive technology is a fast growing trend in educational software infrastructure that, when coupled with educational content, provides data on student learning and can suggest both teaching strategies and appropriate content to address learning needs.

McGraw-Hill, MacInnis continued, has signed a “three year multimillion dollar agreement” to use Inkling Habitat to produce thousands of units of native digital educational content for the K-12 and higher education market. MacInnis said the content will not always be “a book,” but will include interactive and media rich in content, often modular and linked to McGraw-Hill’s underlying adaptive learning technology.

“Our team researched and tested virtually every digital publishing tool we could find, and only Inkling offered both the scalability and ease of use we sought,” said Stephen Laster, McGraw-Hill Education’s Chief Digital Officer

MacInnis said these newest deals had made him a “happy CEO.” He said that Inkling now had "firm" agreements with Pearson, Elsevier, McGraw-Hill and Wolters Kluwer--“four of the top eight educational publishers.” He also said Inkling was working with ten publishers (though he declined to name them) that were in “deployment,” essentially working in pilot programs with Inkling Habitat.

“Its our mission to become the standard for creating native digital content,” MacInnis said. “We plan to expand the kinds of publishers we work with, adding research firms and corporations with publishing programs.”