AcademicPub Signs Leading Publishers and Sets Key Distribution Partnerships

As I've mentioned before I have been an adviser to SharedBook & AcademicPub and I am happy to say publisher relationships and partnerships continue to gain strength and the company just announced new relationships with Springer Science + Business Media, Ambassador College Bookstores and Nebraska Book Company. Here is the press release:

AcademicPub, the higher education unit of SharedBook Inc., today made a three-part announcement underscoring rapid adoption of the service since its April 2011 launch.

According to Caroline Vanderlip, CEO, SharedBook Inc. entered into two new publishing relationships, including one with industry-leader Springer Science + Business Media, and two new distribution partnerships. These innovations will ease the ability of educators to create content and obtain AcademicPub products. Additionally, a new academic advisory board has been created to help guide the unit through an accelerating period of customer growth.

"We are moving on multiple fronts, a necessity in a higher-ed market as dynamic as this one," said Vanderlip. "Publishing relationships make our offering richer, distribution partnerships let us grow our business faster, and a strong advisory board helps us to work smarter."

In the content sphere, AcademicPub finalized contracts with two leading publishers of quality content for higher education - Springer, a highly respected provider of books, journals and encyclopedias in science, technology and medicine; and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). These new partnerships bring AcademicPub's total current number of content partners to 28, representing nearly 400,000 units of material across a range of academic disciplines. A complete list of partners is here.

On the distribution front, AcademicPub has signed separate - and complementary - partnership deals with two of the oldest and largest companies in the distribution of course materials - Ambassador College Bookstores ("Ambassador") and Nebraska Book Company ("NBC"). Ambassador, launched in 1973, is the premier provider of bookstore services and solutions to for-profit career colleges and universities around the country. NBC, founded in 1915 as a single bookstore operator, now operates 280+ brick-and-mortar bookstores on traditional college campuses and provides wholesale textbook services and technology to another 2,500 stores nationwide.

With Ambassador, AcademicPub will be providing the custom book engine for Ambassador's SourcePak, a new white-label product allowing Ambassador's clients, for-profit, career schools, to create custom books, in a professionally bound printed book or as an eBook. SourcePak will be fully integrated with Ambassador's state of the art technology and proprietary supply chain software SourceOne.

In partnership with NBC, AcademicPub will integrate its application with NBC's industry leading JumpBooks® Digital Delivery System and Textbook Requisitions System to support custom book creation, adoption and fulfillment via NBC's network of bookstores and bookstore customers serving traditional higher education.

Created specifically for educators, AcademicPub allows instructors to assemble custom books in real time, with copyright clearance and pricing at the click of a mouse, and choice of delivery options, as either eBooks or as professionally manufactured and printed books.