ALA Midwinter 2011: ProQuest Acquires ebrary in Pre-ALA Announcement

There's often a flurry of business activity in the run up to any American Library Association meeting, and this year is no exception. In a press release from ProQuest today, the aggregator and search company announced that it had purchased ebrary, a longtime player in the academic ebook market.

"This is a game-changer for global research," said Marty Kahn, ProQuest CEO, who pointed out the enhancement of ebook discovery for ProQuest users, as well as the "potential...for imaginative technology mash-ups that will energize users and accelerate the knowledge industry."

Founded by Christopher Warnock in 1999, ebrary provides multi-user access to some 52,000 titles, with subscription purchase, perpetual access, and patron-driven acquisition, along with a robust set of research tools. Both Warnock and ebrary president Kevin Sayar will continue to drive the business in Palo Alto.

In addition to enhanced discovery across ProQuest's platform, ProQuest intends to expand ebrary's "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...as well as to accelerate the indexing of e-book content on its own all-new platform," according to the release.

The acquisition comes less than a year after EBSCO's purchase of NetLibrary from OCLC in March 2010, which gave EBSCO a similar opportunity to expand in the ebook market.

Look for more details on the announcement to follow the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, CA, January 7–11.