Now partnering with EBSCO
The news has hit the industry press: EBSCO is purchasing Salem Press, effective January 30. The Salem Press imprint will live on, and both Salem Press offices will stay open. Since our distribution agreement with Salem remains in place, this now means that EBSCO will be our partner.
EBSCO is obviously a huge player in the information industry, and I’m hopeful that their presence and reach will only mean good things for our books and associated electronic products. At the ALA Midwinter convention this coming weekend in Denver, I’ll be meeting not only with our colleagues at Salem but also with some of the staff at EBSCO. I look forward to learning more details about the acquisition and to discussing the evolution of a relationship that has already proven to be very successful. And for the first time, I’ll be posting updates from the road via Twitter.
As the Library Journal article notes, this is the third major acquisition in the reference industry in the past 6 months (along with Sage’s purchase of CQ Press and ABC-CLIO’s acquisition of Greenwood Press). At the same time, other publishers–notably Oxford University Press–have announced layoffs. Clearly, it’s a time of major change in our industry. Nonetheless, our small size and highly focused publishing program are, for the moment, bringing a lot of stability to our particular corner of the universe. So we’ll continue to focus on creating great new content and building a community of scholars, teachers, and students around the subject of primary source documents.