VitalSource and Al Manhal Collaborate for Increased Access to Digital Learning Materials in Middle East

VitalSource®, the world leader in building, enhancing and delivering digital course materials, and Al Manhal, the leading publisher of full-text searchable electronic databases of scholarly, professional and peer-reviewed content from the Arab World, are now collaborating to expand the reach and delivery of Al Manhal’s unique content collection from over 450 Arabic language publishers.

“Al Manhal has become well known and highly regarded in the Arabic academic community in a relatively short time”

By working together, Al Manhal’s expansive collection will now be deliverable through VitalSource Bookshelf®, the most widely used higher education digital-content platform in the world.

“Al Manhal has become well known and highly regarded in the Arabic academic community in a relatively short time,” said VitalSource^® Managing Director for EMEA and Asia Pacific John Donovan. “Its collection of Arabic-language scholarly resources is unrivalled and we are proud to help deliver that content to learners throughout the region.”

“This strategic alliance between our two companies will enable publishers and students of Arabic textbooks to finally make the same shift from print to electronic that is happening in scientific, technical and medical education across the world,” said Mohamed Al-Baghdadi, President and CEO of Al Manhal. “We are now able to empower students in Arabic humanities and social science programs with the same digital textbook platform that millions of students around the world are benefitting from. The result will be a dramatic impact on the quality of learning and education (and publishing) across the Middle East.”

About VitalSource: VitalSource Technologies LLC, part of Ingram Content Group LLC, is improving the learning experience by making it easier to create and deliver effective and affordable content. The preferred choice among educational institutions and companies for digital learning materials, VitalSource® helps over 1,000 educational content providers create and deliver seamless interactive learning experiences through its exclusive Bookshelf® platform to millions of learners at 7,000 institutions. Bookshelf users opened more than 20 million digital textbooks last year and read more than 3.4 billion pages.

About Al Manhal: Founded in 2010, Al Manhal provides a reliable, transparent and efficient platform to enable the publishing community in the Arab world to maximise the regional and global exposure of their intellectual assets and in turn generate income streams to fund research activities. The platform empowers the academic and research communities with cost effective access to the region’s high quality academic and professional research content through access to the most advanced research tools to search and interact with Arabic documents.