Tuesday, January 6 2004
ebrary(R) (www.ebrary.com), a leading provider of information distribution and retrieval services, today announced that it has increased its customer base by more than 300%, serving hundreds of libraries and other institutions in 35 different countries. At the same time, ebrary has achieved a renewal rate exceeding 95% for its database subscriptions. The addition of these new customers means that over 2 million students and patrons now have instant access to ebrary's growing databases, which currently provide simultaneous, multi-user access to more than 20,000 full-text books as well as over 15,000 reports, maps, sheet music titles and more.
ebrary grew its aggregated databases by more than 30% in 2003 at no additional cost to customers, while adding over 30 new publishers to its growing roster of more than 175 leading academic, professional, and trade publishing partners. ebrary also added new aggregated and publisher-branded databases to its portfolio. Specifically, the former include Public Library Complete, a compilation of eight aggregated, but separately available, databases that collectively cover business & personal finance, career development, computers, history, education, and several other key categories for this market. The new publisher-branded databases include offerings from D&B(R), Harris InfoSource(TM), Datamonitor(R) and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers(R).
Furthermore, in 2003 ebrary made significant technological improvements. Among other enhancements, the ebrary system can now be localized to support multiple languages, dynamically selectable by the user, to further extend ebrary's global presence and scalability. The content viewing experience now supports side-by-side presentation of pages, and scales them dynamically for best fit. Additionally, ebrary's search function now enables Boolean search for advanced query capability, and the overall user interface is configurable on a customer-by-customer basis.
"2003 was a great success for ebrary and our customers, as measured by increased demand in the marketplace, an almost perfect renewal rate, a significant increase in the breadth and depth of our titles, major enhancements to our technology, and a rapidly expanding number of end users," said Christopher Warnock, CEO of ebrary. "Taken together, these results validate our multi-user access model and its significant advantages over competitors' 'single check-out' e-Book and per-seat site licensing models. In 2004, we expect to continue to expand our databases and offerings to meet the increasing market demand we see."
Source:
http://businesswire.com
