Ingram Content Group has announced the launch of Covered, a new digital catalog and galley service designed to help publishers share titles with booksellers, librarians, and media, while also facilitating ordering. The beta launches this fall to a select group of publishers, with broader industry availability and competitive pricing to follow in 2027.
The platform is intended as a cost-effective competitor to Above the Treeline's Edelweiss and NetGalley. Edelweiss in particular has drawn industry ire after significantly raising fees to publishers since being acquired by Montreal-based software company Valsoft in December 2024. Covered also aims to fill a gap for libraries left in the wake of the demise of Baker & Taylor last year.
The core feature set will include publisher catalog creation, reviews, and tags, along with buying tools such as markups, buy suggestions, comps, order export, and select point-of-sale integrations. Booksellers and librarians will have access to title information including marketing plans, comparable titles, sales and inventory data, and marketing assets, alongside a galley program available in print, e-book, and audiobook formats.
Ingram has yet to announce pricing, but said it will be affordable. "Increased costs of galleys and catalog creation disproportionately disbenefit independent publishers, and that's not good for the health of the ecosystem," said Margaret Harrison, Ingram's VP of digital services. "This is really about a healthy publishing ecosystem."
Today's announcement comes just prior to the start of Winter Institute, the American Booksellers Association's annual conference, which opens tomorrow. A session about Covered will be offered Thursday from 10–11 a.m. with Holly Ruck, Macmillan's director of field sales, and Sanj Kharbanda, associate publisher and director of sales and marketing at Beacon Press, participating.
PW spoke with Harrison about pricing, the library opportunity, data security, and more.
How will the platform support direct ordering?
Publishers will be able to facilitate direct transactions with their customers on Covered. EDI ordering will be supported. For our distributed clients, there will be a direct link through to iPage, so there will be a seamless connection for booksellers and libraries placing those orders. But it will absolutely not be exclusive to Ingram in any way. We want to facilitate publisher-direct sales as well.
How will you engage with librarians?
We're investing heavily in the library business. The library industry hasn't really had a provider of catalogs and galleys that deeply understands how library systems work the way Ingram does. We do this cataloging today. We have direct understanding of how those systems work, and we think we can build on that knowledge and direct connection to create a platform for publishers to market new titles directly to librarians—and then have those orders flow seamlessly through to iPage.
What about advertising opportunities for publishers?
We will not have advertising for the beta launch. Over time, it's something that could fit into our cooperative advertising program that exists for publishers.
Will self-published authors—Ingram Spark clients—be included?
Democratizing access to content and independent voices across the board will include self-published authors as well as independent publishers, and large trade and academic publishers as well.
With AI scraping so much content from the web, including pre-publication digital galleys, data security is a concern. How will Ingram handle that?
Ingram is a market leader in data and content security. Booksellers will have a lot of control over who has access to their data. We take our role as a steward of data for the industry very seriously.
