De Gruyter e-dition Offers 60,000 Digitized Titles Dating Back to 1749

["Kathryn Ruehle" <kruehle@degruyterny.com>]

For immediate release:

De Gruyter e-dition Offers 60,000 Digitized Titles Dating Back to 
1749

The new De Gruyter e-dition enables customers to order any book 
from De Gruyter's backlist spanning more than 260 years of 
publishing history. The entire backlist, dating back to 1749 and 
containing over 60,000 books, has been made accessible once 
again. Each title can be ordered in electronic form as eBook on 
Demand or as a hardcover reprint. The offer will be available 
starting in mid-March.

De Gruyter e-dition constitutes one of the most extensive eBook 
selections in the world. The digitized version offers all of the 
features important to the user such as full-text search, 
indexing, and structural data such as DOIs and MARC records. 
Long-term archiving of the eBooks will take place via Portico, a 
service De Gruyter already uses to store digital content.

eBooks can be purchased singly or in a customized package. In 
addition, renowned scholars have compiled their personal "top" 
titles in their academic disciplines from De Gruyter's backlist, 
and these packages will also be on offer. The scholars include 
American linguist Professor William Labov, church historian and 
president of Humboldt University Professor Christoph Markschies, 
mathematician Professor Gunter M. Ziegler, medical scientist 
Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Dudenhausen, and philosopher Prof. Dr. 
Volker Gerhardt. Sales partners Harrassowitz and the Internet 
platform libreka will offer De Gruyter e-dition right from the 
beginning.

"De Gruyter e-dition is an important building block in our 
strategy to digitize our publishing content," said Dr. Sven Fund, 
CEO at De Gruyter. "In 2008 we launched our content platform 
Reference Global, which since then has grown to contain two 
million pages of the De Gruyter Journal Archive. From there, the 
logical next step was to digitize the entire backlist of books."

Customers will receive the finished product within a maximum 
delivery period of ten weeks. Five examples of reprints spanning 
all academic disciplines already exist. These include the volumes 
"Schwabische Volkslieder" [Swabian Folk Songs] from 1855 and 
"Linnaeu's eigenhandige Anzeichnungen" [Linnaeus's Drawings by 
his own Hand] from 1826. All reprints have a jacket reminiscent 
of the original green binding, but which also features the new 
corporate design of De Gruyter.

[SNIP]

"Logistically, it was a tremendous challenge to make these 60,000 
titles accessible again," said Katrin Siems, director of Business 
Development at De Gruyter who is responsible for the project. 
"The suggestion came from our Library Advisory Board, and member 
librarians from all over the world were in favor of the project. 
We are pleased that we could implement their suggestion in just a 
few months."

For more information, please visit 
http://www.degruyter.de/cont/glob/ebooksEn.cfm

Contact:

Kathryn Ruehle
Marketing Manager, North America
kathryn.ruehle@degruyter.com