Directmedia Publishing is a German

publishing house Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

created in January 1995 by Ralf Szymanski and Erwin Jurschitza as a publisher of

digital media Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ' ...

. The emphasis of the publishing house's content lies within the field of

digital libraries A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital me ...

, particularly scientific collections of texts, and encyclopaedias. In co-operation with the

Reclam Reclam Verlag is a German publishing house, established in Leipzig in 1828 by Anton Philipp Reclam (1807–1896).Stuttgart Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the ...

, Directmedia Publishing published the series ''Reclam Klassiker auf CD-ROM'' (Reclam classical authors on CD-ROM), which presents individual works of the

German language German ( ) is a West Germanic languages, West Germanic language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and Official language, official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Ita ...

literary canon The term canon derives from the Greek (), meaning "rule", and thence via Latin (language), Latin and Old French into English. The concept in English usage is very broad: in a general sense it refers to being one (adjectival) or a group (noun) of ...

. The first

German Wikipedia The German Wikipedia (german: Deutschsprachige Wikipedia) is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia. Founded on March 16, 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia (after the English Wikipedia), ...

CD was

published Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...

by Directmedia Publishing in October 2004, and was followed by a

DVD-ROM The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

(and

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both comput ...

) in April 2005. In the first ten days the second edition was presold, 10,000 copies were purchased, 8,000 on

Amazon.de Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econ ...

. Directmedia's sister enterprise, The Yorck Project (based in Yorck road,

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

), specialises in the publication of CDs or DVDs with extensive picture collections including art, photography and historical illustrations. The software used to display content runs under

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, with a beta version for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

also available. In April 2005, Directmedia contributed scans of 10,000 public domain paintings to the

Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a media repository of free-to-use images, sounds, videos and other media. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation. Files from Wikimedia Commons can be used across all of the Wikimedia projects in ...

project. In 2007 The Yorck Project was renamed to Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and started the online digital library

Zeno.org Zeno.org () is a digital library with German texts and other content such as pictures, facsimile, etc., which has been started by the Directmedia Publishing, Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a German Publishing, publishing house and sister enterpri ...

in October 2007. In 2008 Directmedia Publishing and its sister Zenodot were sold and transferred to

Brașov Brașov (, , ; german: Kronstadt; hu, Brassó; la, Corona; Transylvanian Saxon: ''Kruhnen'') is a city in Transylvania, Romania and the administrative centre of Brașov County. According to the latest Romanian census (2011), Brașov has a popu ...

(Romania), led by Claudia Maria Buflea. Zeno.org is meanwhile owned by a non-related company named ''Contumax''.Full company name is “Contumax GmbH & Co. KG”, compar
Impressum
(legal notice) of Zeno.org (German, retrieved on 8 March 2016). The content of Zenodot and DirectMedia Publishing remains nonetheless available.

External links

Digitale-bibliothek.de
no
Versand-AS
with products from Directmedia .
Wikimedia Commons "Yorck Project" category (all images listed alphabetically by artist)
* Wikinews article about the publication of the German Wikipedia DVD, April 2005.
Information about the state of the integration of the 10,000 scans

References

{{Authority control Book publishing companies of Germany Publishing companies of Germany Mass media in Stuttgart