Wednesday, June 6, 2001

Major University Presses Are Signing Deals With a New Online Venture By SCOTT CARLSON Twelve major university presses have agreed to distribute some of their material through Ebrary, an electronic-publishing company that plans to make scholarly and popular content available to the public online. Ebrary's business model is based on something like a virtual copy machine: Users will be able to read the books free online, but will have to pay 15 cents to 25 cents for each page that they download or print. Christopher M. Warnock, Ebrary's chief executive officer, says that the presses will determine the fee for each page and that the majority of that fee will go to the presses and the authors. Ebrary will also try to generate income by offering the presses advertising space on the site. Ebrary is not officially open for business yet. Mr. Warnock says that texts will start becoming available on the site in late June or July. He declines to offer a specific estimate of how many texts he expects to get from the academic presses. The publishing company has already struck deals with about 50 other publishers that will contribute content, but many of them are for-profit companies, such as Random House, St. Martin's Press, John Wiley & Sons, and McGraw-Hill. The twelve presses are Columbia University Press, Marquette University Press, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Purdue University Press, Stanford University Press, the University of California Press, the University of Hawaii Press, the University of Nebraska Press, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of Texas Press, the University of Utah Press, and the University of Wisconsin Press. Laura Young Bost, the rights manager at the University of Texas Press, says that her press will offer only older books -- mainly work published from 1995 to 1998 -- through Ebrary's service. "Scholarly books have a limited market to start with," she says. "In order to make the economics work, we need to sell a certain number of print copies to make publishing the book economically feasible." What's more, Ebrary will accept texts only in the Adobe PDF format; Ms. Bost says that might limit the selection even more because the press doesn't have all of its texts available in that format. She cannot estimate how many books will appear on the site. Ms. Bost says that the decision to sign on with Ebrary was driven both by mission and by marketing. She says that students are "clamoring" for online resources. "We felt, as a scholarly publisher, we have an obligation to make scholarly information available, and if online is going to be an arena for this, we have an obligation to participate." She adds, however, that her press is certainly not putting all of its tomes on one virtual shelf, so to speak. The press has also signed deals with Questia, which mainly markets to undergraduate students, and netLibrary, which markets to libraries. "We feel that the variety in the business models gives our books a good exposure over a range of uses," she says. "In two years, who knows which of these business models will succeed? Hopefully all three," she adds. "There are no guarantees, so we thought it was worth putting time and effort into each of the programs to see what will work." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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