Apress, Inc., based in New York and founded in 1999. Apress was founded by authors Gary Cornell and Dan Appleman. The main focus of Apress is to produce books for software developers, IT professionals and programmers. Its original name was Author's Press shortened to APress, then Apress. In 2003, Apress purchased much of the intellectual property of the designer-oriented publisher friends of ED. Topics covered relate largely to programming issues, on both proprietary and open source platforms. Hardware hacking is also a theme, and Apress has published some books aimed for mainstream consumer electronics users. In addition, Apress crosses over the IT line and publishes business books. Apress uses computer industry leaders to produce in partnership the best technical books in their chosen specialist computer fields. Apress also reviews all books before publishing to ensure they are technically correct like a software company does prior to releasing new software. Many of their published books have source codes attached to them so that readers can learn the skills associated with said work. Apress authors include Andrew Troelsen, Adam Freeman, Ed Yourdon, Matt MacDonald, Andy Budd, Rob Harrop, Dave Mark, Robert Ciesla, Michael A. Banks, Keir Thomas, Malcolm Harkins, Jacob Lamm, Scott Donaldson, Peter Seibel, Bob Walsh, Rory Lewis, and Joel Spolsky. Their print books are distributed worldwide by Springer Science + Business Media, and they are also sold as eBooks and distributed online through the subscription services such as SpringerLink, Books 24X7 and Safari Online. In 2007 Apress was fully acquired by Springer. Prior to this Springer owned a minority stake, and in 2009 Apress' offices in Berkeley, California closed and the business moved to Springer's headquarters in New York. In 2012 Apress announced their new ApressOpen line of books, providing ebooks free through all of their ebook, electronic subscription and sponsor's channels. Springer merged with Nature Publishing Group and other related companies to form Springer Nature in 2015.
Collaborations
As well as collaborating with computer authors. Apress has also collaborated with software companies. Alongside collaborations with large organisations Apress has also sought out collaborations with individuals who have produced work that they feel are worthy of publishing. One such collaboration was with the inventor of the iPhone application sketch, they brought the publishing rights to the book "Little more than a month after releasing the iPhone Application Sketch Book its creator, Dean Kaplan, has already sold the publishing rights to Apress Publishing House for an undisclosed amount." this shows that Apress is looking for not only the kudos of working with big companies but also developing other ideas they think that their readers would be interested in.
ApressOpen
In order to release Apress publications to a wider audience they have created ApressOpen where they currently have 25 completely free books to download. In order to achieve this they are using Springerlink which allows "over 122,000,000 unique visitors per year as well as on Apress.com, Intel.com, and all major eBook and database platforms."
