A Digital Repository for Scholarly Books
BiblioVault helps scholarly publishers preserve and extend the value of their books, providing long-term secure storage of digital book files for member presses and a wide range of scanning, printing, transfer, conversion, file distribution, and ebook fulfillment services.
Launched in 2001 by the University of Chicago Press, BiblioVault operates under the umbrella of Chicago Distribution Services, which also oversees a digital printing center, the Chicago Digital Distribution Center (CDDC). The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supported the development of BiblioVault and the CDDC with three grants totaling $3.2 million.
Today, the BiblioVault repository serves more than 70 university presses and contains digital files for more than 20,000 books.
BiblioVault Services
BiblioVault offers a variety of services to presses. These include:
- Preparing ebook files and delivering them to digital book vendors, such as Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble ebooks, Sony, ebooks.com, Google Books, ebrary, NetLibrary, OverDrive, CafeScribe, iGroup, Questia, etc.
- Fulfillment of electronic books (protected or unprotected) for press shopping carts
- Conversion from PDF to reflowable formats (epub, html, prc/mobi)
- Scanning older titles to create print-ready electronic files
- Short-run digital printing at the CDDC's digital printing center
- Sending files to any printer a press designates, anywhere in the world.
- Delivery of protected ebooks as complimentary copies for text exam or review uses
- Preparing files for use by disabled students through the accessibility offices of colleges and universities
- Evaluation and enhancement of PDFs, to assess their suitability for printing offset or short-run and to fully prep them for conversion to other formats (includes chapter assembly, preflighting, basic corrections, page-through, and bookmarking)
- Producing excerpts in PDF, html, or epub formats
- Addition of ISBN-13 information to pre-2007 files as requested by presses
- Custom corrections, file alterations, and delivery services as requested by presses
Why participate in BiblioVault?
Maintaining digital book files in BiblioVault enables publishers to manage a book's content throughout its life. A press can use its files to support offset and short-run digital printing, full-text and metadata searches, and electronic delivery of whole and partial books.
By depositing files systematically in BiblioVault, presses gain flexibility and can select the best combination of price and timetable for printings. BiblioVault also eliminates the need to store film or files with printers at hefty fees.
The BiblioVault staff helps presses to convert older titles, to deposit digital files for recent titles, and to use BiblioVault to manage their titles. Staff members provide assistance with file standards for recent books, depositing files, understanding ebook options, and working with BiblioVault's password-protected Web site.
BiblioVault's Web Site
BiblioVault hosts the public Web site, http://www.bibliovault.org, where anyone online can look up the repository's 20,000 works by title, author, or ISBN. Search results bring up marketing information about the books, including cover thumbnails, tables of contents, excerpts, reviews, and author biographies, when available.
Each of these marketing pages features a link directly into the appropriate press shopping cart, for immediate purchase of the book. Accessibility offices can request files for students with disabilities from these pages as well.
The BiblioVault Web site includes an extensive password-protected publishers' site (where you are presently reading this file), where member press users can submit and retrieve their files, edit metadata about their titles, mail out copies of their files as needed, and arrange for services involving their files. The publishers’ site allows presses to transfer their files to BiblioVault, access their files to make changes or corrections, send them to vendors for offset or digital printing, send publicity materials to review media or booksellers, and provide files to electronic aggregators and vendors.
The digital content held in BiblioVault can support a variety of uses, including electronic delivery of the full text or selected parts of a book, delivery of parts of a book to support hard-copy printing in coursepacks, or inclusion in digital libraries or databases.
For more information about BiblioVault and the services it offers, or for a tour of the BiblioVault Web site, please contact Kate Davey at 773-834-4417 or kdavey@press.uchicago.edu.