Ebrary, one of the pioneers in aggregating books and other print content online, has been acquired by ProQuest for an undisclosed price. Founded in 1999 by Christopher Warnock and Kevin Sayar, ebrary hosts more than 273,000 digital books, handbooks, reports, maps, journals and other content from about 500 publishers that it offers to libraries and other institutions under a variety of services and platforms. Warnock and Sayar will continue to run ebrary from its Palo Alto offices. The acquisition comes on the eve of the ALA midwinter meeting at which both companies with will be in attendance.
“Ebrary is extremely excited to become part of ProQuest,” Warnock said in a statement. “There is tremendous synergy between our products and services and as well as our teams. Together we know that we can provide best-of-kind services to libraries worldwide and the users they serve.”
ProQuest said it will continue to invest in ebrary’s products and services for the academic, corporate, and public library markets including Academic Complete, the company’s flagship product that provides 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. In addition, 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 own research content. The goal, ProQuest said is to position ebrary to drive new levels of e-book discovery and usage, enhancing value for both publishers and end-users.
