Thomson Sells and Buys
Posted On May 16 2007If you thought the world of Mergers & Acquisitions was hard to follow in the library systems marketplace, well buckle up for content providers. The Thomson Corporation has sold off its assets in Thomson Learning to Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, for a total of about $7.75 billion in cash. (I love seeing “in cash.” . . . “Hey, can you break a trillion? I left my billions in my other wallet.”) The transaction includes Thomson Gale, Wadsworth, Delmar Learning, Brooks/Cole, and South-Western, and comes as no surprise since the intent was announced last fall. Details of the plan …
HodgePodge
Posted On Apr 19 2007Nothing major really striking my fancy, but there has been a smattering of interesting news on the library technology front in the last couple of weeks. Free-gle Scholar Some scholarly societies are launching something that is either a counter to or a target for Google Scholar. Scitopia.org will launch this summer and include 3 million articles from 13 scholarly societies. The jury has not even gathered yet since it’s only April and the site will not launch until June, so I am left only to complain at this point that I don’t have any great love for press releases that …
Books More Digital
Posted On Mar 28 2007I’ve always had a hard time explaining my position on e-books. Some of my esteemed colleagues are quick to point out the minor dent that e-books have made in overall book sales in this country and others. But when I started evangelizing about e-books back in the late 1990s, we were still talking about what I call the “curl-up factor.” I grew so tired of hearing people complain about not wanting to curl up with an e-book, or the inability to take an e-book to the beach, that as soon as I read either phrase in e-book commentary, I simply …