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PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION (2/10/2009)

Roberts and Company Publishers (Denver, Colorado) and Sapling Learning (Austin, Texas) sign strategic partnership.

Loudon textRoberts and Company Publishers will distribute the SaplingLearning.com online homework and tutorial system as supplementary content for organic chemistry courses. Sapling Learning has produced a specific course designed for instructors using the fifth edition of Organic Chemistry by Marc Loudon (published January, 2009).

SaplingLearning.com is a comprehensive online learning and homework portal for chemistry that provides rich, interactive user experiences to students. It combines proven web-based learning management, student assessment, and a robust user environment that enables faculty to modify, adapt and author chemistry content. Based upon Sapling’s flagship product, IBIS™, used by numerous higher education publishers, SaplingLearning.com is among the most powerful and flexible online learning environments available. The rich student interactions for organic chemistry include molecular drawing and visualization, chemical and mathematical equation entry, reaction mechanism diagramming, and graphing.

Loudon's Organic Chemistry is known for its wide variety of problems, most of which are taken directly from the literature. This edition contains 1,672 problems—ranging from drill problems to challenging, multi-part problems. Sapling Learning augments this total with hundreds of additional problems, organized to match the textbook. Jamie Caras, the president of Sapling Learning, states, "We have taken full advantage of our software’s molecule and reaction mechanism drawing capabilities when producing this comprehensive set of organic chemistry content. As a result, students will perform better in their courses because they will practice the same types of problems online that they will be challenged with on their pencil-and-paper exams."

The text is offered at $125.00, and the package including the study guide and solutions manual, is $150.00. Publisher Ben Roberts states, "This price is a clear departure from the rest of the market, with most organic text packages averaging $250.00, and some ranging as high as $300. Most instructors just want a good book at a good price, so that's what we're giving them. We've dispensed with most of the other stuff that usually attends these books and raises the cost."

Loudon's book has been endorsed by many professors at a wide variety of schools, including Boston College, Caltech, Cornell, Duke, Hamilton College, Harvard, and the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Irvine. Robert Grubbs at Caltech states that while "each edition has represented a major advance in the presentation of new chemistry, they have all retained the lucid presentation and order of topics that attracted us to the first version." David Evans at Harvard University calls it "one of the premier texts of this generation."

Roberts and Company publishes academic monographs and textbooks in chemistry, such as The Organic Chemistry of Biological Pathways by John McMurry and Tadhg Begley (both of Cornell University) and Posttranslational Modification of Proteins by Christopher Walsh (Harvard Medical School). The company is based in Denver, Colorado.

Sapling Learning develops rich media software and content for chemistry and the problem solving sciences. Founded in 1998, the company has authored tutorials, assessments and a wide variety of multimedia currently used by leading higher education publishers. The company is based in Austin, Texas.

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