Whitaker was originally founded in 1858 by Joseph Whitaker, a London Bookseller. His first creation for the book trade was the Bookseller. This was a monthly publication providing details of recently published books. The idea of creating a monthly listing of recently published books was developed and the same information was produced on Microfiche. Over time and to keep pace with technological advancements and market demands further products were developed. Whitaker produces a number of daily, weekly, monthly and annual products from Microfiche through to CD-ROM, DVD and online services.

The UK SBN Agency is managed by Whitaker and issues both ISBNs and SANs for the UK Book trade. Our management of the Agency enables us to gain access to a wider range of small independent publishers, which in turn makes our data extremely comprehensive.

Whitaker today is owned by BPI, a US subsidiary of the Dutch Publishing group VNU. The organisation has three divisions, Whitaker Information Services, Whitaker Business Publishing and Whitaker BookTrack.

Whitaker Information Services is the UK’s leading supplier of bibliographic information to the book trade. Whitaker provides bibliographic data to thousands of customers throughout the World including bookshops, libraries, Internet retailers and publishers. Whitaker owns the highly successful TeleOrdering service which traffics 65% of UK trade orders and processes all other messages via their EDI service. The TeleOrdering service is widely used in UK with over 30 million order lines being sent every year. Other Whitaker services include BookCovers, SourceData, BookBank on PubEasy.com and LibWeb, the online database for libraries.

Bookseller Publications produce the Bookseller, a weekly trade magazine for librarians, booksellers and publishers as well as a range of specialist publications and reports such as Book Publishing in Britain. TheBookseller.com is a popular and well-respected web site for everyone in the trade.

Whitaker BookTrack provides market information on sales through UK bookshops, which is supplied to publishers and other businesses. BookTrack is a unique service and has been able to address the real issue of reliable and usable information for the whole trade.