(San Francisco, CA - October 10, 2000) - NetRead today announced its Academic Developmental Partnership, a year-long initiative that will bring together leading academic publishers, including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, and Princeton, to discuss metadata, standards (such as ONIX), and innovative online marketing techniques.

"Academic presses are unusually sophisticated with respect to catalog issues," said NetRead founder and CEO Pete Alcorn. "Because of their strong backlists, they've been among the first publishers to recognize the importance of distributing rich product data to the electronic retailers. They also tend to place a great deal of emphasis on highly targeted sales and product reviews. NetRead's tools for catalog distribution will benefit from our dialog with these market leaders."

NetRead's product, JacketCaster, is a hosted application that allows book publishers to distribute electronic catalogs and product announcements to electronic retailers, as well as wholesalers, industry databases, buyers, reps, and product reviewers. JacketCaster is designed to eliminate the technical hassles associated with catalog distribution and lower the costs of book marketing. Since May, JacketCaster has been used by major trade publishers, academic presses, and distributors to communicate catalog information to Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com, Bowker, Borders.com, Ingram, FatBrain, and others.

About NetRead: NetRead provides web-based infrastructure for: (1) distributing product information to online retail channels, and (2) executing product-specific online marketing programs. JacketCaster helps publishers communicate with clients, consumers, the media, and--most importantly--sales channels like Amazon, Ingram, Bowker, and BN.com. In addition, NetRead offers a variety of marketing tools to help publishers effectively market their products, services, and events.