ebrary Announces Investment From Three Big Publishers

ebrary moved a step closer to its big launch after receiving joint investment from three publishers: Random House, Pearson and McGraw-Hill.

ebrary plans to 'soft' launch late this year with over 100,000 (PDF) documents ready to search and access. All ebrary's content be freely accessible for online reading, with transaction fees only occuring if the reader/researcher wants to print copy or download the content (content is anything from one page upwards).

The content will come in many forms including books, journals, maps, periodicals and digitally archived material, most of which was previously inaccessible via the Web. According to a recent interview with ebrary CEO Christopher Warnock the site will include documents on subjects such as science, technology, management, education and many others.

"The fact that this is the first-ever co-investment by three major publishers in this space demonstrates the broad range of support for ebrary’s model and philosophy," said Christopher Warnock, chief executive officer of ebrary. "ebrary is now poised, with the help of our partners, to finally make the content of books, periodicals and other traditionally printed documents accessible to everyone on the Internet in a manner that benefits publishers, libraries, booksellers and Internet users, while protecting the authors’ copyrights.

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