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

Berlin, March 5, 2010
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 hardcover reprint. The offer will be available
starting in mid-March.
The 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 the provision
of structural data such as DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) 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 are also
on offer. The scholars include Professor Christoph Markschies, church
historian and president of Humboldt University, the mathematician Professor
Günter M. Ziegler, the medical scientist Prof. Dr. Joachim W. Dudenhausen,
the philosopher Prof. Dr. Volker Gerhardt and the American linguist
Professor William Labov. Important sales partners, Harrassowitz and the
Internet platform libreka, will offer the entire De Gruyter e-dition right
from the beginning.
“The 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 “Schwäbische Volkslieder” [Swabian
Folk Songs] from 1855 and “Linné’s eigenhändige Anzeichnungen“” [Linné’s
Drawings by his own Hand] from 1826. All reprints have a jacket reminiscent
of the green Göschen binding, but which also features the new corporate
design of De Gruyter. http://www.degruyter.de/cont/glob/ebooks.cfm
The historic backlist consists of works of the following publishing houses:
Georg Reimer, Königliche Realschulbuchhandlung, Veit & Comp., Guttentag
Verlagsbuchhandlung, Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, Walter de Gruyter, Alfred
Töpelmann, Marcus & E. Weber’s Verlag, Technischer Verlag Moritz Krayn, L.
Friedrichsen & Co., K. G. Saur, Max Niemeyer, Mouton and  Foris Publications.
The entire Göschen collection, all out-of-print volumes of Bibliotheca
Teubneriana, writings of Adolf von Harnack and the series “Das Tierreich”
[The Animal Kingdom] are among the sources which have been made available
once again. A recent rediscovery is a book on the Prussian Queen Luise,
which contains two commemorative speeches of Theodor Mommsen and Heinrich
von Treitschke. Because this year is the 200th anniversary of Queen Luise’s
death, this volume will certainly be much appreciated by connoisseurs. Also
of special interest are works from the second half of the 20th century that
still play a significant role in the scholarly discourse. These include
milestones in linguistics such as “Languages in Contact. Findings and
Problems” by Uriel Weinreich (1979) and “Language Universals” by Joseph
Greenberg (1980).
“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 the 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.”

Contact:

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Ulrike Lippe                                             
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De Gruyter: The independent academic publishing house De Gruyter can look
back on a history spanning over 260 years.  The publishing group with
headquarters in Berlin and New York annually publishes over 800 new titles
in the humanities, medicine, science and law and more than 120 journals and
digital media. http://www.degruyter.com/

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