Back Index Forward
Weekly News Digest
March 26, 2001 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks. CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.

netLibrary Announces Agreement with Blackwell’s Book Services, Sells peanutpress.com, Inc.

Blackwell's customers will be able to search for e-books using key numeric criteria such as ISBN and LCCN, or by using keyword searching by title, author, publisher, or series title. For each title, Blackwell's customers will have access to detailed bibliographic information, including series title, alternative editions, publications status, current list prices, and publisher. netLibrary e-book titles integrated into Collection Manager will also be displayed as alternative editions when Blackwell's customers review title information for print books.

netLibrary has also announced the sale of peanutpress.com, Inc. to Palm, Inc., a provider of hand-held computers. The deal includes a Web-based storefront containing a growing list of 2,000 titles from U.S. publishing houses. It also includes the Peanut Reader, an e-book reader application, which runs on Palm OS handhelds using Palm OS 3.0 and higher, as well as on Pocket PC handhelds. Peanut Reader and peanutpress.com will be called Palm Reader software and Palm Digital Media, respectively.

netLibrary issued the following statement about the sale:

Selling peanutpress.com enables netLibrary to achieve two goals. First, to increase our focus on our core business, which is to provide a world-class e-book technology solution for academic, K-12, corporate, government, and public libraries. Second, to increase our efforts to develop solutions for an equally successful e-textbook platform and to ensure we provide the content necessary to support the growing e-learning market. We are committed to continually improving every aspect of our e-book and e-textbook technology solutions. First and foremost, that means we will continue to integrate our solutions into the familiar library methods and systems. Additionally, we will continue to provide viable options for supporting the business needs of our publishers, distributors, library automation software providers, librarians, library patrons, professors, and students. In recent months, our increased focus on the institutional library market has enabled us to serve a growing demand for e-books, enabling adoption of more than 30,000 titles across more than 5,500 libraries and institutions worldwide.