Long-Awaited? 

Long-Awaited ebrary Has Arrived

While netLibrary and Questia struggled to establish themselves as the premier provider of academic and scholarly ebooks to the higher education market, ebrary quietly sat on the sidelines and watched. What ebrary saw was a great deal of complaining about netLibrary's pricing (150% list price) when only one person at a time could access the title. They also observed that students are not willing to pay $19.95/month of their own money for research materials that they cannot first evaluate and deem worthy of the price tag. Both netLibrary and Questia have experienced severe funding shortages and have dramatically reduced their staffing level (Questia is down to only 27 employees).

With the competition on its knees, ebrary launched its ebook system, ebrarian, in mid-January. Although libraries did not appear initially to be an important customer base for ebrary, libraries have become ebrary's core customer. Unlike netLibrary, any given title in ebrary's collection can be viewed by unlimited, simultaneous users. Moreover, a library purchases access to ebrary's entire, expanding collection and not on a title by title basis as is required by netLibrary. Unlike Questia, patrons can view all of the titles within ebrary's collection for free. However, a per page fee is charged for each print and/or copy transaction. The fees range from $.15 to $.50 and are determined by the publisher. [read more]

Question: Just exactly who's been waiting so long?

It's the book, stupid 

thought for the day by Gary Frost

The print original, its microfilm copy or its digital posting all provide access, but FotB suspects that CLIR (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2002 "The Preservation of Our Brittle Books Must Also Preserve Access" by Deanna B. Marcum and Anne R. Kenney) feels that the surrogate modes provide the "real" access, either over time as with film or with automated search and finding aids as with digital library building. The conventional print access from originals is discounted by disqualification of the source as "brittle" or vulnerable to deterioration. This consideration should really not disqualify print access in view of the relative permanence of the surrogate media!

FotB suggests that the inherent attributes of print access need more advocacy... [read more]

Rising Monopoly 

OCLC Closed Purchase of netLibrary

On January 24th, the sale of netLibrary to OCLC was finalized. netLibrary's purchase price was approximately $10 million, far less than the over $100 million that netLibrary raised in venture capital during its early years (from Rocky Mountain News). According to Publishers Weekly, netLibrary will remain in Boulder, under the oversight of Rob Kaufman, founder and CEO. The ebook operations will become a division of OCLC, while MetaText, a digital textbook company previously purchased by netLibrary, will become a for-profit subsidiary of OCLC.

As soon as the purchase of netLibrary was approved by the courts, OCLC announced changes to netLibrary's services and payment options. Effective January 24th, netLibrary discontinued access to its eBook Reader, a software that supported off-line viewing of netLibrary ebooks. In addition to low usage and general customer dissatisfaction with the software, netLibrary also attributes the decision to the growing number of titles in pdf format; a format that the eBook Reader does not support. [read more]

Future issue: Coming soon, to the net, electronic delivery monopoly.

Photography 

PhotoGraphic Libraries, Education resource