From its humble beginnings as a sketch on the back of an envelope, ingenta inc., a U.K-based online distributor of academic journal and book content, founded by Mark Rowse in 1998, has quickly become one of the top 20 U.K. Web sites, with close to half a million unique visits a month.
Last month, ingenta, which has offices in Bath and Oxford, and operates the Bath Information and Data Services (BIDS) for the U.K.'s higher education community, opened an office in Massachusetts, in Cambridge's Harvard Square. It also hired an American COO, Christine Lamb, formerly with Silverplatter Information Inc.
Rowse told PW, "ingenta's view has always been about being global," and both Rowse and Lamb emphasized plans to quickly sign more publishers on this side of the Atlantic. They also intend to launch a redesigned Web site by January. But first, said Lamb, noting that the company has already hired several American sales reps, "We're trying to promote the service to publishers." Among the publishers that have already contracted for ingenta's services are Elsevier Science, Academic Press, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford University Press and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
"The strategy behind ingenta," explained Rowse, "is to occupy a central position in the online scholarly market. There are 12,000 publishers and 200,000 publications." It's up to the publishers to set their own subscription and pay-per-view fees. Ingenta charges them for hosting and distribution. Its bibliographic searching services are free to end-users-primarily librarians and academicians. In addition, ingenta makes publishers' materials ready for distribution over third-party channels such as OCLC.
While the service is noted for providing full text of academic journals online, Rowse is quick to point out that books are "our central business." The company is working on offering marketing advantages specifically targeted to book publishers. Rowse said. "We can alert people to a new textbook coming up. The [site's bibliographic] references are often to books, and in the new year, we'll enable people to navigate to a book."
