SCN: Web libraries

[Steve]

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======================

The Library as the Latest Web Venture  

by Lisa Guernsey

(NY Times)---When Carrie Larkworthy, a student at Harvard 
University, is faced with a research project, getting a book out of the 
library is the last thing on her mind. Instead she sits in her 
dormitory room and logs onto the Web, starting with Harvard's 
online system for searching and retrieving journal articles. "I hate 
the library, so I try to avoid it," Ms. Larkworthy said. "It's such a big 
facility that you have to search through."  

If Ms. Larkworthy's experience is anything like that of other 
students, and many librarians acknowledge that it is, the use of 
books for research is becoming an archaic concept. If scholarly 
books are not on the Web, they are invisible to anyone using the 
Internet as a substitute for in-depth investigation.  

But new efforts are afoot to change that. Several companies are 
racing to put the full texts of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted 
books, old and new, on the Web.  

NetLibrary started the contest, with technology that lets people view 
books online for short periods of time, the digital equivalent of 
borrowing them from the library.  

Now two other companies, Ebrary.com and Questia Media, are 
taking on the same challenge but using a new strategy. They want to 
give people the opportunity to search through reams of pages at no 
charge, then will charge people a few cents a page for using that 
information. (Questia users will be asked to pay for viewing, copying 
and printing the online pages. Ebrary.com users will be able to view 
pages free but will pay for copying and printing.)  

These electronic library projects are not attempts to compete with 
the budding electronic book industry, which offers books for 
downloading to handheld devices and is focused on popular fiction, 
like Stephen King's recent Web-only novella, "Riding the Bullet," 
and on other newly published trade books. The library projects have 
very little to do with the debate over the promise or pitfalls of 
gadgets that let people read novels electronically from the comfort 
of their beds.  

In fact, the new effort to build an electronic library is not about 
reading at all. It is about the power of electronic searching. With 
digital scanning, texts of works that may be decades old can be 
mined for those few morsels of insight that may enhance a research 
paper or help prove an argument. It could be a way, some 
publishers say, to move books into the Web's fold and make them 
more visible to students like Ms. Larkworthy.  

"In an ideal world, a person would find a book in the card catalog, 
pull it off the shelf and use it," said Kate Douglas Torrey, director of 
the University of North Carolina Press. "But that is just not the world 
we live in today." The University of North Carolina Press is among 
more than 80 publishers working with Questia to turn many of their 
titles into searchable documents available on the Web.  

Laziness is not always the excuse for avoiding the traditional 
library. Even people who do go hunting in the stacks are sometimes 
thwarted. The books they want might be checked out or misplaced, 
lost forever among call numbers that have no relation to the sticker 
on their spines. Or the books might be at other libraries and 
available only to those researchers who are willing to wait weeks for 
interlibrary loans.  

Such situations can be avoided on the Internet, proponents of digital 
libraries say. "This will take some of the tedium out of research," 
Ms. Torrey said, "and make it easy to use an extensive collection of 
scholarly work."  

Of course, people have been hailing the promise of digitized 
libraries for years, and the reality has not yet measured up. When 
netLibrary opened in March 1999, for example, it was promoted in 
press releases as a company that would "revolutionize the library 
system" by enabling people to tap into a searchable and 
comprehensible database of reference and scholarly books.  

Until this month, netLibrary offered two types of access: holders of 
library cards from participating libraries could use the service at no 
charge, and others could subscribe to the service for $29.95 a year. 
The subscription option is no longer being offered to new users.  

Now netLibrary is primarily a service for public, academic and 
corporate libraries that want to buy electronic titles and make them 
available to their patrons.  

Rob Kaufman, netLibrary's president and chief executive, said the 
shift away from a consumer service was partly an attempt to 
appease librarians and publishers. Some librarians said the service 
was competing with them. Publishers did not like the subscription 
model for another reason: they said it gave people too much access 
to electronic texts at too low a price.  

Even those who gain access to netLibrary may find the experience 
less than satisfying. There are just not yet enough books in the 
site's collection to make serious searching worthwhile. The site now 
has about 18,000 copyrighted books and 4,000 public-domain works, 
numbers that are tiny compared with the hundreds of thousands of 
volumes in most research libraries and the millions of volumes in 
major ones.  

Will companies like Questia Media and Ebrary.com do any better? 
Ebrary.com already has more than 130,000 volumes in its 
demonstration database and says that it may include as many as 
600,000 by the time it opens in the fall.  

Questia, backed by $45 million in venture capital, plans to offer 
access to 50,000 volumes when it opens next spring and is working 
toward a goal of 250,000 books in three years.  

These numbers are possible, the founders say, because they have 
appealed to publishers' pocketbooks. When a book is sold to an 
actual library, the publisher makes a one-time profit. That book 
might be retrieved and read by hundreds of people, but the 
publisher never sees another dime. In the models used by Questia 
and Ebrary.com, however, that book could continue to make the 
publisher money as more people see it.  

Anyone going to Questia's site, for example, will be able to search 
the entire database of books at no cost, but only subscribers will be 
able to see the books' pages by clicking on the search results. 
(Questia has not yet set its subscription price, but Troy Williams, 
the company's chief executive, said that it would be "affordable for 
the average college student.")  

Ebrary.com has adopted what Christopher Warnock, the chief 
executive, calls "the photocopier model." Searching will be free, he 
said, and so will the act of simply reading whatever pages are 
retrieved from a search. But when a person tries to copy the text of 
those pages by using copy and paste commands, a dialogue box 
will appear on the screen. In a recent demonstration, the box said: 
"This will cost you $0.25. Would you like to continue?"  

The same kind of message pops up when a user tries to print the 
page. If the user decides to pay for copying or printing, the software 
will automatically generate a citation for the work and place it below 
the copied or printed text.  

Most people will have no problem paying a few cents for what they 
want, Mr. Warnock said, since they already scrounge up quarters to 
use photocopy machines. At the site, a user will be able to sign up 
for a debit account of, say, $10 and will then need to type in a user 
name and password during each session in which the user prints or 
copies pages.  

These payments, the founders say, can add up to big money when 
millions of people are spending a few cents at a time. And many 
publishers are willing to license their copyrighted material in 
exchange for some of that cash. "It holds the promise of being 
profitable," said Tim Cooper, vice president for strategic operations 
at Harcourt Trade Publishers, one of the companies that has signed 
a letter of intent with Questia.  

It is not just those micropayments that interest publishers, said 
Larry Weissman, director of new business development for Random 
House, which, he added, has struck no deals with either Questia or 
Ebrary.com. But the ideas are appealing, Mr. Weissman said, partly 
because they may introduce readers to new works. "The hope is that 
they would want to continue that reading experience by buying a 
book," he said.  

If the sites succeed, they will be mixing the qualities of libraries and 
bookstores. Most people think of the bookstore as a place to buy 
and the library as a place to borrow or browse at no charge. But on 
the Internet, where full texts can be searched in seconds and 
information can be retrieved with a few clicks, convenience is part of 
the package as well. These companies, including netLibrary, are 
betting that people will pay for it.  

Librarians are intrigued by the concept, said Kenneth L. Frazier, the 
president of the Association of Research Libraries. And they are 
eager to see how quickly texts can be digitized when put into the 
hands of companies, which may find more efficient ways to scan 
books on a huge scale.  

But Mr. Frazier, who is director of the general library system at the 
University of Wisconsin at Madison, also wonders what that will 
mean to traditional research libraries, which have always been 
motivated by public interest, not private profits. Making sure that low-
income people have access to expansive new online libraries is 
one area of concern. Another concerns the selections made by 
digital libraries. Will databases include only the most popular 
books, Mr. Frazier asked, "or the stuff that gets the highest return 
economically?"  

At Ebrary.com, books are included for technical reasons. They must 
already exist on publishers' computers in a format called PDF (for 
portable document file), which was developed by Adobe Systems 
and is commonly read online using the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Many 
publishers, Mr. Warnock said, have been using this format since the 
early 1990's during the design of their hard-copy books.  

Questia is taking a more academic approach. It has hired Dr. Carol 
Hughes, a research librarian who recently worked at the University 
of Iowa, to lead a team of librarians in selecting core titles that have 
been known to be useful to college students. A few of the books that 
will be included on Questia are "The Industrial Revolution," a 1956 
book by Arnold Toynbee, and a 1982 edition of Dante's "Divine 
Comedy."  

Dr. Hughes said she suspected that Questia might drive more 
students to the actual library instead of away from it. After using the 
Web to find books that meet their needs, she said, they may want to 
check them out to read them more closely. "I think it is going to 
greatly enhance libraries," she said.  

Being able to search online books will help students see their value, 
Dr. Hughes said, particularly when they can easily get access to 
books that have become classics in particular subject areas.  

A nonprofit project called JStor is often offered as proof that 
digitizing old texts can breathe life into them. For the past five 
years, JStor has been creating digital copies of scores of scholarly 
journals, some of which have issues more than 100 years old. 
University libraries around the world pay for access to JStor and 
provide it to their students free. A recent study by JStor showed that 
students used the online service almost 20 times as much as they 
dug into the stacks for the paper versions.  

Just a few years ago, said Mr. Frazier, of the University of 
Wisconsin, librarians and publishers scoffed at the idea that a full-
scale project like JStor could be adopted for books any time soon. 
Many people said it would take centuries before the equivalent of a 
library's bookshelves would ever make it onto the Web.  

But now that Mr. Frazier has seen and heard about new efforts, he 
said, "I'm not so sure about that anymore." "I think this might 
happen much more quickly than we might have imagined a few 
years ago," he added. No longer, he said, will books suffer from 
what he called that "fatal disadvantage": the fact that they are 
available only in print.  

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company





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