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.