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ebrary Announces Strategic Partnership with Kirtas Technologies; Libraries and Publishers Now Have a One-Stop Solution for Digitizing Printed Materials in PDF and Distributing Them OnlinePALO ALTO, Calif. --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 19, 2006 -- ebrary(R) (www.ebrary.com), a leading eBook technology and services provider, today announced it has partnered with Kirtas Technologies, a leading provider of digital scanning solutions. The partnership brings the library industry a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for digitizing their bound documents. Under terms of the agreement, libraries who digitize their print materials into PDF using Kirtas Technologies' software and hardware now have the option of seamlessly and effortlessly implementing it into ebrary's OnDemand(TM) platform. OnDemand is ebrary's core technology platform that turns static PDF files into dynamic, cross searchable databases under a variety of access and business models. For libraries, the partnership provides an easy and cost effective way to digitize printed materials such as manuscripts, case studies, thesis, and historical books. Using the Kirtas APT BookScan 1200, APT BookScan 2400, and the editing software packages BookScan Editor(TM) and BookScan Editor Pro(TM), libraries can digitize and place content on ebrary's OnDemand platform to disseminate out to their end-users, either publicly on the Internet or privately behind the a firewall. "This partnership provides a state-of-the-art solution to libraries as they digitize their print materials," said Kirtas Founder and CEO Lofti Belkhir. "It is exciting to combine the expertise of our organizations and offer an integrated approach to solving the print to digital process." The partnership seamlessly combines the two firm's core technologies, providing reduced development costs, time to market, and overall cost of ownership. "Kirtas Technologies is at the forefront of the digital book scanning industry, with an automated book scanning technology that can scan an average book in less than eight minutes," said Christopher Warnock, ebrary's CEO and CTO. "As a growing number of libraries are investing in digitization projects to keep pace with an increasing demand for electronic content, we are extremely delighted to partner with Kirtas to offer a back-end solution to their front-end digitization capabilities." Ebrary's OnDemand platform integrates with a customer's creation and dissemination workflow. It provides multiple search options including simple, advanced, full-text, key word, Boolean, and proximity search, and personal bookshelves automatically archive highlights, notes, and bookmarks. The OnDemand platform integrates with other subscription databases, federated search engines, and authentication systems, and provides usage reporting tools that display how each piece of digital content is being used while protecting end-user privacy. OnDemand offers automated PDF submission. With Kirtas, users have state-of-the-art bound document imaging, automatic image cleanup and image enhancement, along with an XML-driven digitization workflow. Extensive image post-processing functions with Kirtas BookScan Editor and BookScan Editor Pro software offer unique image cleanup and enhancement, multiple output options, and an integrated interface for descriptive and structural metadata. About Kirtas Technologies Kirtas Technologies was founded in 2001 with the vision of bringing to the digital realm, the massive knowledge sitting on library shelves, government archives and corporate storerooms. Today, their revolutionary technology redefines digitization of all bound documents, delivering gentler handling and higher image quality faster, with fewer errors and at a dramatically lower cost than any other solution in the marketplace. For more information, visit their website at www.kirtastech.com. About ebrary ebrary(R) is an eBook technology and services company dedicated to serving the library and publishing community. The company offers libraries a growing selection of eBooks under both a subscription and perpetual access model. For publishers, ebrary provides multiple ways to cost-effectively and efficiently distribute content in industry standard PDF to libraries and other global markets. ebrary products are delivered via the ebrary Dynamic Content Platform (DCP)(TM), which features patent-pending technology and enables flexible pricing structures and access models. The DCP transforms eBooks or any PDF content into highly interactive databases, where every word, in every document, contextually links to additional information automatically through the ebrary Reader(TM) and InfoTools(TM) software. ebrary has been named to the eContent 100 list of "companies that matter most" in the digital content industry for three consecutive years. Founded in 1999, ebrary is privately held and is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. |
