Official: EBSCO Acquires YBP

UPDATE 4:45 PM: Coverage from Meredith Schwartz at Library Journal
UPDATE 2:45 PM: We’ve added links to comments from ProQuest re:GOBI at the bottom of this post.
Here’s the official announcement from EBSCO about today’s acquisition of YBP Library Services. More to come on infoDOCKET and on Library Journal.
From EBSCO:

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) is announcing a significant investment in the library workflow with the acquisition of YBP Library Services (YBP) from Baker&Taylor.
Founded in 1971, YBP Library Services has proudly served as the leader in delivering academic library workflow and “shelf ready” solutions through its innovative suite of acquisition and metadata resources. GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information) serves as YBP’s primary tool for the discovery and acquisition of digital and print monographic content. Relied upon by academic, research and special libraries worldwide, GOBI provides access to more than 12 million titles, including more than one million digital titles from leading aggregators and publishers.
EBSCO has been providing collection development and acquisition services for print and electronic journals (e-journals) for more than 60 years. EBSCO is the largest provider of these services to libraries worldwide.
Senior Vice President, YBP Sales & Operations, Mark Kendall, believes EBSCO is the perfect landing place for YBP because of its strong commitment to libraries. “EBSCO fully understands the value that YBP and our outstanding staff bring to libraries and is committed to supporting this while also helping expand our core services through investment in new technologies. They have a leading edge vision for integrating collection development and acquisition services for all formats of content, including monographs and journals, with their discovery solution. This commitment will add significant value to both libraries and end users and we are excited to be a part of this vision.”
According to EBSCO President, Tim Collins, the company plans to let YBP be YBP. “YBP is recognized in the market as the leader at what they do. We want them to keep doing it. We are in a position to help their progress and expedite their vision, and we are looking to continue their operations and partnerships with publisher and aggregator platforms. The people and philosophies are a match, and we are excited to welcome YBP to the EBSCO family.”
The Bigger Picture
Beyond GOBI3 and the core services YBP offers, this acquisition brings together the components of an integrated solution that will help change the course of library automation. YBP is the perfect fit for EBSCO, a company that is putting the pieces in place to truly streamline and improve administrative (‘back end’) services in ways that optimize the impact these services have on the end user experience. 

With YBP, EBSCO brings together print book and eBook acquisition workflows with its existing full suite of journal ordering and maintenance workflow services. The vision of seamless integration from back end to the front end is becoming a reality.
Collins says, “Consider EBSCO Discovery Service as the centerpiece to the library research network as it is the place where end users go to discover the entire library collection. By integrating our discovery service closely with the established workflow tools that libraries use to order and manage their collections, we can maximize the availability and usage of library resources and deliver an improved end user experience. We see this as a fundamental goal shared by libraries and EBSCO. Because we partner with numerous ILS vendors, the number of end users that are impacted is significant.” As the result of partnerships with dozens of ILS vendors including Open Source services, patrons can now search, find and execute holds on books, and interact with other patron catalog functionality — all within the EBSCO discovery experience or the front end of the library’s choosing.
Collins credits a number of EBSCO’s advisory boards whose guidance help EBSCO better understand what libraries need and the role EBSCO can play in creating a better library experience, which helped lead to EBSCO’s interest in acquiring YBP.

Direct to More Information about the EBSCO/YBP deal.
UPDATE: ProQuest Comments on EBSCO News: Will Continue Collaboration With YBP

ProQuest is continuing to make our ebook content and workflows available through GOBI with no disruptions. Our selection of ebooks will continue to be offered through all available purchase models, including Perpetual Archive, Short-Term Loans, Demand-driven Acquisition (DDA) and Extended Access. Customer contracts with ProQuest will be unaffected and account contacts remain the same.

ProQuest offers additional comments in this blog post.
Some Recent YBP Partnerships

• YPB Library Services Named Supplier For Ontario Colleges Library Service (OCLS) (January 5, 2015)

• YBP Becomes Primary Academic Book Supplier to University of Toronto Libraries, Replaces Ingram (via The Varsity; July 31, 2014)

• YBP Library Services and Ex Libris Collaborate to Streamline Library Operations (June 27, 2014)

• Books at JSTOR and YBP Library Services Announce Partnership (May 22, 2014)

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), EBSCO, Ex Libris, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Publishing, Resources, Special Libraries