PW: Ebrary.com Offers Web as Serious Research Tool

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Ebrary.com Offers Web as Serious Research Tool
Paul Hilts -- 3/27/00

One of the more interesting booths at Seybold Publishing 2000 in Boston last month was a sneak preview of ebrary.com, an Internet "Knowledge Store" set to debut this summer. Ebrary.com aims to make the World Wide Web a serious tool for researchers by paying attention to how people really do research and how they use the Web. Until now, doing real research on the Web has been difficult because so few serious texts are available there, according to Nat Green, ebrary's director of publisher relations.

"Two kinds of materials are generally available on the Web," Green said. "Copyrighted text is like a 'gated community,' limiting access by subscription; 'free-floating' uncopyrighted text allows lots of access but contains little hard information. Neither is particularly useful to serious researchers.

"Students and professional researchers need to browse many, many documents, but [they should] pay for just what they use; publishers need to track the usage of their products better. Ebrary helps out both of them," Green continued. "Our first target is university presses and scholarly publishers, though we've had positive response from nearly everyone we've talked to."

According to Christopher Warnock, founder, president and CEO of ebrary.com, "We're not a publisher, we're not a library, we're not a retailer--so we don't compete with any of them. Instead, we form partnerships with all of them to help them do their businesses better. We store the texts in PDF format, so the works retain the look their publishers intend. But the ASCII file is contained in the PDF, so the full text is searchable."

Users of ebrary will be able to browse texts, from a page to a whole book, for free. By typing in a word or phrase, passages containing that word will be highlighted. Users will then highlights any sections they want to download or print and pay a fee "equivalent to a photocopy fee" (on the order of 25 cents per page, but set by the publisher) and the text will be downloaded to a disk or printed on a local printer.

Ebrary texts will contain cross-references both to other ebrary texts and to any text on the Web. The company has written software, called InfoTools, to provide for researchers' other needs: definitions, explanations, translations, biographies and map locations; it also adds automatic citations to any section copied or printed. The publisher's name also appears on every page downloaded or printed, increasing brand-name awareness.

If users want more text than can be conveniently printed nearby, ebrary will have links to e-retail sites to buy the whole book. Warnock told PW that by the time the service is functioning, they will have ties to print-on-demand functions as well. Account management software written by ebrary will provide publishers with a summary of all transactions--the number of times each title has been printed or copied--by author, subject and date of publication.

Green also pointed to the company's Early Adopters Program, for publishers who sign on as the service ramps up. "Early Adopters will have the benefit not only of more PR splash," he noted, "but will keep a greater share of revenues generated [up to 80%, according to company brochures] for the first two years of the program. We want to have a substantial number of titles available before we go live."

Official launch of the service is tentatively scheduled for June, and the company will have a booth at BEA.

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