Publishers Weekly and NA Publishing Partnering to Digitize Entire Archive (143 Years) of Industry Publication

From PW:

Publishers Weekly is launching a partnership with NA Publishing, Inc. to digitize the entire 750,000 pages of the magazine’s archives. Known as “the Bible of the book publishing industry,” Publishers Weekly was founded in 1872 and has been published continuously since then.
“The complete digitization of the Publishers Weekly archives has been a goal since our acquisition of this extraordinary resource; for the sake of posterity and of history it must be saved,” says George W. Slowik, Jr., president and CEO of PWxyz LLC, the parent company of Publishers Weekly. “It will provide an historical record of the advancement of the industry, with news, features, sales figures, trends and so much more. As well, the inclusion of PW’s renowned book reviews, which began in the 1940s, serves literary historians and lovers of literature alike.”
Publishers Weekly reviews approximately 9,000 titles per year, and there are approximately 200,000 reviews currently available in digital form. It is estimated that there are 100,000 more book reviews in the archives.
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Slowik and Moyer expect that the release of the archive—it will be sold to libraries and made available as gated content accessible to subscribers on Publishers Weekly’s website—will be a boon to literary historians as well as to the industry in general.
Moyer estimates the project to culminate in 2017, and he has already heard expressions of interest from larger library systems in acquiring the archive, which will be fully searchable.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Public Libraries, Publishing, Resources