Information Today
Volume 19, Issue 4 — April 2002
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McGraw-Hill Education to Register DOIs

McGraw-Hill Education and Content Directions, Inc. have announced the signing of a comprehensive registration agreement through which McGraw-Hill Education will begin registering Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) across all of its major book-publishing programs. DOI is a system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment. It is like the bar code in the physical world, but is used for Internet-based resources such as digital content that's published online. DOI uniquely identifies digital objects and provides a permanent link to the publisher, thus facilitating online transactions of all kinds, including e-commerce, rights management, and digital distribution.

Evelyn Sasmor, vice president of product and marketing technologies at McGraw-Hill Education, said: "McGraw-Hill Education has supported the DOI standard from the very beginning, and we are pleased that the system has now reached a point via the establishment of a commercial Registration Agency—Content Directions—where major publishers can now register large numbers ofDOIs into the global directory. This opens a new era in publishers' use of the online medium, not only to sell e-books, individual chapters, and other innovative formsof content, but to sell traditional, physical books as well. The DOI will help us grow top-line revenue even as it also helps us reduce or avoid bottom-line costs."

David Sidman, founder and CEO of Content Directions, said: "McGraw-Hill Education has demonstrated vision and leadership by becoming the first major book publisher to adopt the DOI as its standard identifier. Content Directions is proud to have a strategic customer like McGraw-Hill Education, which not only sees into the future but is willing to help create it."

McGraw-Hill Education had earlier demonstrated the sales and marketing potential of DOI by publishing the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook, the first DOI-enabled e-book on the Internet. It was distributed free in September 2001 in both Microsoft Reader and Adobe eBook Reader formats. Enhanced with a DOI link at the beginning of the book, which enables the reader to travel over the Web to purchase the print edition if desired, the DOI multi-link also facilitates availability of free excerpts, exposure to book reviews, access to the publisher's catalog page for additional related information, and sales across a publisher's distribution chain regardless of format, all directly from within Adobe eBook Reader or Microsoft Reader.

Through the DOI-EB project, which is sponsored by the International DOI Foundation and project-managed by Content Directions, McGraw-Hill Education has also created a series of DOI demo applications. More details, including these demos, are availableat http://www.contentdirections.com.

Source: McGraw-Hill Education, New York, 212/904-2078; http://www.mcgraw-hill.com.

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