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. 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 ...
, 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, 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 language mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Italian province of South Tyrol. It is als ...
literary canon
The term canon derives from the Greek (), meaning "rule", and thence via 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 official, authent ...
. 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, new ...
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 k ...
(and CD-ROM) 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., doing business as Amazon (, ; , ), is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos i ...
.
Directmedia's sister enterprise, The Yorck Project (based in Yorck road,
Berlin
Berlin is Capital of Germany, the capital and largest city of Germany, both by area and List of cities in Germany by population, by population. Its more than 3.85 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European U ...
), 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 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 computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
, 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 i ...
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 Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a German publishing house and sister enterprise of Directmedia Publishing GmbH. ...
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 po ...
(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.