Xrefer.com Offers HM Titles

The British online company xrefer.com has announced its first deal with a U.S. content partner. Under the arrangement with Houghton Mifflin, a number of HM reference titles, including The American Heritage Concise Dictionary and Dictionary of Idioms, Wall Street Words and The Houghton Mifflin Dictionary of Geography, will be added to the xrefer online library (www.xrefer.co.uk).

Set up in early 1999, xrefer is an online reference engine designed to aggregate and integrate the contents of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri, books of quotations and reference works. So far it has signed up nearly 40 titles from some of the best known U.K. publishers including Penguin, Macmillan, OUP, Bloomsbury and Market House, and it is currently negotiating for many more. The xrefer software allows all the contents to be searched and cross-referenced, thus creating a network of links from a topic in one source to related topics in all the others.

All the material is available free of charge to site users, and xrefer will make its money from advertisers. The company has also set up a number of sponsorship options as well as sublicensing material to sites looking for high-quality factual information. The resulting revenue is shared with contributing publishers.

Commenting on the new link with HM, Adam Hodgkin, managing director of xrefer. com, said that it would add an important U.S. component to the site's U.K. titles.