Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Digital-Library Company Plans to Charge Students a Monthly Fee for Access By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK A new digital-library company that claims it will "transform how academic research is done" hopes to entice students to pay as much as $360 a year for online access to searchable books and journals. The company, Questia Media, is relying on a classic Internet marketing strategy called "viral marketing" to create a buzz about itself among students. The strategy uses a tell-a-friend e-mail campaign to "create a hype" for its service even before it begins in January, according to Ann Brimberry, the company's manager of marketing and public relations. The e-mail messages include an offer of a free monthlong trial of the service. Questia says it will have more than 50,000 scholarly books and journals in its electronic collection by January, and five times as many by 2003. The company says its service will help "time-crunched students" write their papers more quickly. Questia will sell subscriptions to its collection for $20 to $30 a month, depending on the price the company ultimately sets. For that amount, users will be able to search for topics by keyword, copy the material into their papers electronically, and have the footnotes for those references created automatically. For papers submitted electronically, the footnotes can be hyperlinked to the source document, which would allow a reader of the paper to check them with a simple click of the mouse -- assuming, of course, that he or she is also a Questia subscriber. Troy Williams, a 1998 Harvard Law School graduate who is Questia's founder, president, and C.E.O., says the service's search-and-copy features respond to the way students really do their papers. "They're not reading the books," says Mr. Williams. The company has circulated news of the offer through e-mail messages and postings on several discussion lists used by librarians. The e-mail technique is similar to one used to promote the free Hotmail e-mail service and other Internet products, not to mention movies such as The Blair Witch Project. Several thousand people have signed up for the offer already, Ms. Brimberry says. Whether those users and paying customers will find the service helpful, however, is far from certain. Questia boasts of signing 135 publishers willing to make some of their titles available through the service. At a time when many publishers are still wary about electronic distribution, that's no mean feat. But a good deal of what the publishers are providing is out-of-print material, which may prove less useful to the liberal-arts undergraduates the company is focusing on as its prime market. Ann Okerson, associate university librarian at Yale University, says that she has had indications that the company is assembling a legitimate collection, but she adds that she hasn't seen what Questia plans to offer. "You don't yet know what's inside the black box," says Ms. Okerson, who has just agreed to serve in an unpaid position on the company's new Librarian Advisory Council. The company, based in Houston, has raised $130-million in venture capital and is expected to go public eventually. It has also attracted as members of its unpaid Advisory Council the likes of Barbara Bush; John Seely Brown, the chief scientist for Xerox; and Clifford Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. Questia's business model, which relies on the sale of subscriptions to individuals, is one that a rival, netLibrary, had previously tried as well. But netLibrary has since abandoned the approach because it was costly and because the company found that winning business directly from libraries gave the company more credibility. Some academics, including Ms. Okerson, have also worried that the Questia service could be too expensive for some students, putting them at a disadvantage to wealthier classmates. At Yale, she says, people would say, "You don't create a set of have and have-not users." She says one reason she joined the library board was to try to persuade the company to consider selling institution-wide site licenses, so that all students could have access to the service. Questia says it has no plans to offer such licenses. As for how Questia might affect the way students research and write, Ms. Okerson says the service just creates a more robust approach to what many already do now with information they locate on the Internet. "I keep hearing this called the 'cut-and-paste generation,'" she says. "It's going to be up to teachers and librarians to keep instilling the values of teaching and research." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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