CABI has acquired an aquaculture books list of 18 titles from 5m Books – with 14 more in the pipeline – that covers fish farming practices and sea life pathology.
Now available on the CABI Digital Library, the titles from 5m Books include The Shrimp Book II, edited by Victoria Alday-Sanz, Aquaculture Business, edited by Carole Engle, and Molluscan Shellfish Aquaculture, edited by Sandra Shumway.
Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing sectors
In addition to 18 frontlist titles, the acquisition also includes 14 titles in development and represents an important subject area as aquaculture is one of the fastest growing sectors among all food production systems, growing by 6% annually for the past three decades.
Damian Bird, Publishing and Operations Director at CABI, said, “These high-quality books will complement the rest of our books programme by strengthening an area that is important to CABI.
“It sits well alongside existing content, including our CABI Compendium aquaculture channel and our abstract and indexing database coverage.”
The aquaculture books acquired from 5m Books are available to buy on CABI Digital Library in print, as ebooks and for the first time as a digital ebook collection or through all usual book channels and suppliers.
Realise the significant potential in this list
Jeremy Toynbee, Publishing Director from 5m Books, said, “We are delighted that CABI has acquired the aquaculture titles and am sure they will succeed and flourish under their ownership.
“Now the books are in CABI’s hands, we believe that they can realise the significant potential in this list, and we are pleased to see the books we have worked on, and the authors we have commissioned, well-served moving forward. The sale will allow us to focus on our core agriculture and veterinary subject areas.”
Growth in CABI Publishing and partnerships
The acquisition from 5m Books further represents the growth and investment in CABI Publishing.
In July this year, CABI and the International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS) announced a partnership that, from 1 January 2025, will facilitate the development of ISHS journal publishing activities and enable ISHS titles to join CABI’s growing journals portfolio on the CABI Digital Library.
This followed a partnership agreement made in August 2023, for CABI to publish all future editions of the Royal Entomological Society’s (RES) series Handbooks for the Identification of British Insects. The much-loved series has helped amateur and professional entomologists with insect identification and taxonomy since 1949.
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About 5m Books
5m Publishing was founded in the late 1990s, initially publishing books on pig husbandry. Over time we have grown by building up a respected list of agriculture and veterinary titles.
In 2012, 5m was bought by Benchmark Holdings PLC, a multinational animal-health company, who drove an expansion into aquaculture books and a reinvigoration of veterinary commissioning.
Further expansions came when the back catalogue of Nottingham University Press was given a home in 2013 when the university ceased publishing activities.
Benchmark looking to simplify its activities sold off its publishing, conference and website interests in 2019/2020.
5m’s key staff bought out the book business and relaunched as 5m Books in July 2020. Since then, we have grown our output significantly, but have increasingly focussed on land-based agriculture and veterinary titles, which is where our real interests lie.
About CABI Publishing
As an academic publisher in the life sciences, we play a part in helping to solve global challenges by combining our work in academic publishing with our work in international development, investing surpluses from our publishing business back into our development projects.
Our publications in applied life science - including world-leading databases, books, eBooks, compendium, case studies and e-learning - help scientists discover credible and authoritative outputs from around the globe. Our tools add insights to data and help people apply science to real-world problems.
Our expertise and skills in publishing help put knowledge into context and put it into the hands of those who need it most. Our learning resources build the capacity of farmers, practitioners and scientists to improve agricultural practices.
Find out more here.