GMST .. competition from XRX ???
Is this a potential rival to GMST's e-books
initiatives ??????
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booktech.com, The Market Leader in e-Education Content, Forms Strategic Technology Alliance With Reciprocal and Xerox
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 14, 2000-- Reciprocal(TM), the leader in global Digital Rights Management (DRM) transaction services, Xerox Corp. (NYSE: XRX), and booktech.com, the on-demand publisher of digital custom textbooks and course packs, today announced that the three companies have formed a strategic technology partnership.
booktech.com is developing a world-class digital e-learning portal utilizing the digital copyright management and transaction processing services of the Xerox/Reciprocal electronic Publishing Clearing Service. The portal will bring publishers, professors and students together in an online, secure, copyright-protected environment.
"booktech.com is introducing a state-of-the-art professor/student Web portal to afford professors and students the opportunity to create, aggregate and order custom published materials online," said Dr. Morris A. Shepard, booktech.com's president and CEO.
"Thanks to the Xerox/Reciprocal electronic Publishing Clearing Service, our portal will combine custom textbook development, copyright permissions, order placement and accounting into one online easy access system."
"booktech.com is an innovative leader in the online education and custom learning market," said Reciprocal CEO and President John Schwarz. "They recognize that for digital distribution of high-value content to be successful they must protect their content from unauthorized use, ensure that the rights of all copyright holders are enforced, and simultaneously enable secure but easy acquisition of the content by their target customers.
"The electronic Publishing Clearing Service offers these advantages and provides a one-stop Digital Rights Management service that integrates seamlessly into booktech.com's existing business and workflow systems."
"We are seeing a trend in the higher education sector towards providing broader and more convenient information sharing between institutions and their students," said Ranjit Singh, senior vice president and general manager of Xerox Rights Management.
"As the booktech.com initiative shows, professors and management want to provide faster access to directly relevant course materials and this is being well received by students.
"The electronic Publishing Clearing Service is unique in meeting these real-life organizational needs and allowing education institutions and publishers to launch Internet initiatives of this type securely, easily and cost effectively."
Integrating e-Education and Digital Rights Management
Custom textbooks (course packs), in which educators compile the best and most useful information from texts, journals, newspaper articles, electronic media, and original works into one package, have become common on today's college campuses. Traditionally, they cost less than hardbound textbooks and allow the students to have only that information that pertains to their course.
With the popularity of the Internet, students in both remote and on-campus locations are demanding that these course materials be available online rather than in hard-copy format. Publishers and aggregators of educational content, aware of the issues of "pirated" information and the subsequent loss of revenue, are turning to Digital Rights Management solutions to address these problems.
"booktech.com, with over 75,000 works digitally processed and stored online, is an important educational publisher in the custom learning market.
"We are thrilled that the Xerox/Reciprocal electronic Publishing Clearing Service fulfills their digital rights management needs and allows them to distribute their timely, high-value content in a secure and protected manner," said Reciprocal Publishing's Senior Vice President and General Manager Matt Moynahan.
"We look forward to working with booktech.com to develop a customized DRM offering for their digital business strategy."
DRM protects and controls access to digital content so that it can be distributed to the end-user without risking a loss of copyright for the content owner. It ensures that access to the content is in accordance with the terms of the copyright agreement, giving content owners control over who receives their valuable content, and provides them with flexible online offer management of the content.
DRM thus allows them to securely protect and distribute their content over the Internet and ensures that the rights of copyholders are upheld.
The electronic Publishing Clearing Service from Xerox and Reciprocal addresses the problems of online publishing, while giving publishers the advantages of cutting-edge technology and rights clearing services with virtually no administrative effort on their part.
It frees content aggregators and publishers from the set-up, hosting, and publishing of high-value copyright-protected information, allowing them to outsource any or all of the online publishing process. This DRM commerce service combines Xerox's ContentGuard DRM technology and content commerce applications and set-up services with Reciprocal's rights enforcement and clearing, informational and financial tracking, reporting services, and 24/7 customer support.
About booktech.com
booktech.com (http://www.booktech.com), with headquarters in Woburn, Mass., is a four and a half-year-old digital, and on-demand publisher of custom textbooks and course packs. It has built a customer base of more than 2,500 professors and students in some 500 American colleges and universities, ranging from Harvard University to the University of Alaska.
In addition to colleges and universities, booktech.com has become an important custom publishing resource in the k-12 market with such noteworthy titles as: "Breaking the Spanish Barrier," "Breaking the French Barrier," "Trade Routes," and "Choices."
About Reciprocal
Reciprocal offers a full-service Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution, making it easy for businesses to take advantage today of the growing digital content economy. Reciprocal, the leader in DRM processing, provides clearinghouse and back-office solutions for the music, publishing, film, entertainment, and other content-specific industries. The company offers the only scalable, digital clearing service that is multi-platform, multi-vendor, and multi-content compatible, and capable of handling millions of transactions per day.
Privately held, Reciprocal Inc. builds its DRM services based on technologies from Microsoft Corp., InterTrust Technologies Corp., Xerox Corp., Preview Systems and Adobe Systems Inc. A number of forward-thinking companies use Reciprocal's services, including Bertelsmann Storage Media Group, Reuters, Sony Corp., Houghton-Mifflin Co., among others. The company maintains offices in New York City, Buffalo, N.Y., and Research Triangle Park, N.C.
Note to Editors: Reciprocal, the Reciprocal symbol and Driving the Content Economy are trademarks of Reciprocal Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other products and companies mentioned are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners. For more information on the companies listed in this release, visit their Web sites: reciprocal.com and xerox.com.
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Contact:
Reciprocal Inc.
Chris Conway, 781/729-8271
chriscon@reciprocal.com
or
booktech.com
Stephen Encarnacao, 781/933-5400
sencarna@booktech.com
or
Text100
Franziska Marks, 415/836-5990
FranziskaM@Text100.com
EOM ----------------------------------------------------
Jim in CT .. |
