Last January ProQuest  announced a definitive agreement to acquire EBL.  Today, they are announcing that the acquisition of EBL has been completed.  The details from the press release are below.   You may also be interested in listening to an interview I conducted with two of the primary individuals involved in this acquisition, Kari Paulson, formerly [...]

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I attended the American Library Association MidWinter Conference in Seattle, Washington January 26 -29th.  While there, I was able to speak with several eBook companies about new features and services.  Below you will find a list of companies (alpha order) and new features complete with links for more information. I also want to bring your [...]

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Last week, ProQuest announced a definitive agreement to acquire EBL.  I had a chance to interview two of the primary individuals involved in this acquisition, Kari Paulson, President of EBL, and Kevin Sayar, Senior Vice President of ProQuest.  Kari and Kevin discussed with me how the acquisition plans developed, what customers can expect in the [...]

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ProQuest has done it again.  Just two years after the acquisition of ebrary, they announced today plans to acquire EBL.  EBL, a global ebook aggregator, was founded in 2004 and offers over 300,000 titles in their collection.  They have long been a competitor for ebrary, offering similar monograph content to academic and special libraries worldwide. [...]

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Earlier this week I had a chance to interview David Swords, VP of Sales and Marketing for EBL.  David is also the Editor of a new DeGruyter/Saur title, Patron Driven Acquistions:  History and Best Practices.  In the interview David discusses the content of the book and inserts specific examples of PDA programs in libraries today. [...]

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YBP Library Services and Ebook Library (EBL) have announce that they have combined their unique strengths to create the first demand-driven approval plans.  With this announcement, followed by developments to come later, the two companies will use the accurate, book-in-hand descriptions from YBP’s approval process with the malleable patron-driven tools of EBL to offer a [...]

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Yesterday, I joined a panel of publishers, aggregators, and archiving agencies to discuss the issue of eBook archiving.  I had to set the stage for libraries, which was quite easy – we are in fear of losing our content to which we no longer have control of since it is housed on someone else’s server [...]

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ebrary announced today the launch of the much awaited patron driven acquisition model.  It’s been a couple of years in the making, received considerable testing, and was grown from librarian demand and suggestions.  A brief history: ALAMW Conference, 2009.  ebrary hosted a session to discuss patron driven acquisitions and many librarians were there to offer [...]

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Yesterday at the LJ/SLJ eBook Summit I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion of the acquisition models of eBooks for academic libraries.  We chatted about business models, workflow issues and their opportunities and challenges, the pros and cons of electronic access,and the future of eBooks.  I was pretty busy doing my moderating duties [...]

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If you had top executives from 4 academic eBook aggregators in the same room, what would you ask them?  Seriously, I need to know.  One of the Lively Lunch sessions at the XXX Annual Charleston Conference is an open forum with academic eBook aggregators from ebrary, EBL, Ingram, and NetLibrary.   I’m looking for suggestions on [...]

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