Thomas Register

The Thomas Register of American Manufacturers, now ThomasNet, is an online platform for supplier discovery and product sourcing in the USA and Canada. It was once known as the "big green books" and "Thomas Registry", and was a multi-volume directory of industrial product information covering 650,000 distributors, manufacturers and service companies within 67,000-plus industrial categories that is now published on ThomasNet.

The books were first published in 1898 by Harvey Mark Thomas as Hardware and Kindred Trades. In their heyday, Thomas Register of American Manufacturers was a 34-volume, 3 section buying guide offering sourcing information on industrial products and services, along with comprehensive specifications and detailed product information from thousands of manufacturers. The Thomas Regional Directory Company began as a division of Thomas Publishing in 1976. Thomas Regional Regional Industrial Buying Guides provided information in print and on CD-ROM, on local OEMs, distributors, MRO services and other custom manufacturing services in 19 regional editions covering much of the United States. Thomas Register and Thomas Regional were available online from the mid 1990s. The company stopped publishing its print products in 2006.

Thomas has moved its database online as ThomasNet, published and maintained by Thomas Industrial Network, one of Thomas’ five business units. ThomasNet has expanded to provide not only product and company information, but also online catalogs, computer-aided design (CAD) drawings, news, press releases and blogs.

Thomas Publishing Company, LLC of New York City has been privately held since its inception. It used independent representatives to sell advertising space around its listings in print products like the Thomas Register and the Thomas Industrial Regional Directories, and these representatives continue to sell Internet related products to manufacturers, distributors, and other companies.

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