News

HOLTZBRINCK PUBLISHERS LAUNCHES
US PUBEASY.COM WEBSITE

First North American Installation of Leading E-Business Service Goes Live

White Plains, NY, March 17, 2000 . . . PubEasy.com, the global Internet inquiry and ordering service, and Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, the leading trade and college textbook publisher, today announced the launch of Holtzbrinck’s Business-to-Business (B2B) PubEasy.com website at http://pubeasy.vhpsva.com. Access is free to all booksellers with a PubEasy.com password. Booksellers who wish to receive a PubEasy.com password simply log on to the Internet and go to http://register.pubeasy.com.

Holtzbrinck’s PubEasy.com web site provides booksellers around the world with access to title price and availability, order status and order placement services over the Internet 24 hours a day, 7 days-a-week. Since price, availability and order status information is pulled directly from Holtzbrinck’s back office fulfillment system, all information is real-time. In addition, booksellers can use the Holtzbrinck PubEasy.com site to check the status of all their orders with Holtzbrinck Publishers regardless of how the order is placed – EDI, phone, fax, mail, PubEasy.com - and also check the status of their back orders. Orders placed over the web are secure and acknowledgements are fast and accurate.

Over 75,000 titles from the full range of Holtzbrinck’s publishers and imprints will be available via their site, including: Bedford, Freeman & Worth College Publishing, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador USA, Saint Martin’s Press, Tor and their distributed publishers.

"Holtzbrinck Publishers is committed to using technology to continually improve service to our customers," said Fritz Foy, Senior Vice President & Chief Technology Officer of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC. "Launching a PubEasy.com site does this by giving our customers the ability to get title and order information, as well as the ability to place orders, any time of the day or night."

"We are extremely pleased to have Holtzbrinck’s PubEasy.com site go live in the US, " said Peter F. Clifton, Chief Executive Officer of PubEasy.com. "Holtzbrinck has taken a leadership position in the US market with respect to offering customers web-based business-to-business services and their customers will be the first to benefit from enhanced online customer self-service.

Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC, is the service organization, providing distribution services, for the Bedford, Freeman and Worth College Publishing Group; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador USA, St. Martin’s Press; Tor and their distributed publishers.

PubEasy.com, winner of the Xerox sponsored Innovator of the Year British Book Award, is the Internet inquiry and ordering service which represents the new standard in e-commerce for the global bookselling industry. More than 2,000 booksellers from over 90 countries spanning North America, the UK, Europe and Asia are using the service to access title, price and availability information, to place orders, to check the status of their orders and to access catalogs from participating publishers, distributors and wholesalers. Booksellers with a PubEasy.com password can directly access a participating Affiliate website on the network. The service is free to booksellers and is available via the Internet 24 hours a day, 7-days a week.

Other US Affiliate websites scheduled to launch include: AIDC, Broadman & Holman, National Book Network (the second largest US book distributor) and Random House.

Macmillan Distribution Ltd., Marston Book Services, Exel Logistics, Bookpoint (Hodder Headline), TBS/Grantham Book Services and J. Whitaker & Sons provided early support and endorsement of PubEasy.com. Participation from the bookselling industry continues to grow, with recent Affiliate sites launched by John Wiley & Sons Ltd., Gardners Books, Penguin UK, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. and Littlehampton Book Services. Airlift Book Company is scheduled to launch a PubEasy.com website in the coming months.

To access PubEasy.com, booksellers require a password, a computer with a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.

PubEasy.com^TM is a registered trademark of VISTA Computer Services, Inc.
PubEasy.com is a subsidiary of VISTA Computer Services, Inc.

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To access PubEasy.com, all booksellers need is a computer, a Web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later) and an Internet connection. Login to http://www.pubeasy.com and click the 'Register' button to obtain a user ID and password.