ProQuest acquires ebrary

ProQuest has acquired ebrary. The agreement will marry the companies’ technologies and add a growing pool of a quarter of a million e-books to ProQuest’s content offerings, according to the company. The combined collection will enable users to search seamlessly across multiple formats – books, journals, dissertations, newspapers, video, and more – and across eight centuries of the world’s knowledge.

'This is a game-changer for global research,' said Marty Kahn, ProQuest CEO. 'While a natural next step has been to enhance e-book discovery for ProQuest platform users, there’s also far greater potential here. We’re primed for imaginative technology mash-ups that will energise users and accelerate the knowledge industry. The creative minds and deft technologists of ebrary are a welcome and fitting addition to our future-oriented business.'

ProQuest plans continued investment in ebrary’s products and services for the academic, corporate, and public library markets including Academic Complete, which is the company’s flagship product. ProQuest also plans to expand ebrary’s selection of research tools and 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. The company will also accelerate the indexing of e-book content on its own all-new platform where books offered by ebrary will be searchable along with ProQuest’s highly-sought research content.

Christopher Warnock and Kevin Sayar, ebrary's founders, will remain to lead the business in its Palo Alto headquarters. 'This is the next chapter for ebrary,' commented Kevin Sayar, ebrary president. 'We are happy to be part of an organisation with a broad range of strengths and we’re looking forward to collaborating in ways that will inspire entirely new information solutions and captivate new users.'