Originally launched in 1996, SpringerLink (www.springerlink.com) provides students and researchers with electronic access to the largest collection of eBooks, to more than 1,500 peer-reviewed Springer journals, as well as to 18,000 protocols for laboratories. The eBook Collection also comprises more than 140 reference works and over one thousand book series. Springer introduced its eBooks in July 2006 with 10,000 titles. The Springer eBook Collection was introduced in July 2006 with 10,000 titles and recently, the number of available titles tripled and reached 30,000 eBooks. The company's goal is to add approximately 5,000 titles each year to the collection.
Olaf Ernst, President eProducts Management & Innovation at Springer said, "STM content is particularly suited to the eBook format. Our eBook Collections seek to meet the requirements of researchers in the academic and industrial environment, and we aim to continue making research available at this rate in order to keep scientific inquiry up-to-date and to support development moving forward."
Springer boasts one of the most liberal purchasing models of digital content currently available. The company allows unlimited simultaneous access to eBooks for members of the purchasing library community. The eBooks' PDF and HTML documents are fully searchable and can be downloaded and printed. In addition, once a library purchases Springer's eBook Collection, they own the book content for their use in perpetuity. Libraries can either purchase a complete collection of all Springer titles from a copyright year or one or more of 13 distinct topic categories (for example, engineering, medicine, computer science, or mathematics).
The Springer eBook Collection provides MARC 21 records, a standardized form of electronic cataloging records. Recently, Springer also launched MyCopy, which allows a library's registered patrons to order softcover copies, for their personal use, of those Springer eBooks that the library has purchased.
Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) is one of the world's leading suppliers of scientific and specialist literature. It is the second-largest publisher of journals in the science, technology, and medicine (STM) sector, the largest publisher of STM books and the largest business-to-business publisher in the German-language area. The group publishes over 1,700 journals and more than 5,500 new books a year, as well as the largest STM eBook collection worldwide. Springer has operations in over 20 countries in Europe, the USA, and Asia, and some 5,000 employees. In 2007, it generated annual sales of around EUR 906 million.