Ebrary Cites '03 Growth; Predicts More

Citing a 300% growth in customers and revenue, Christopher Warnock, founder and CEO of Ebrary.com, an online information retrieval service, told PW, "It's been a great year." Founded in 1997, the Palo Alto, Calif.–based Ebrary.com offers libraries and organizations a proprietary technology that allows users to retrieve full-text content electronically.

Although Warnock declined to give precise figures on Ebrary's profitability or revenue ("we're a private company"), he cited a 300% growth in the number of customers, "roughly" the same increase in revenue, and he pointed to significant "growth in the payments we make to publishers." He noted that over the past year, Ebrary has added significant numbers of publishers and titles, and that its technology has been licensed in about 35 countries. Ebrary technology can be customized and can have a completely different look than the Ebrary.com Web site. Warnock said there are now about two million students —"the typical Ebrary user"—with access to Ebrary content in the U.S. and around the world.

Ebrary licenses its technology to academic, public and corporate libraries, offering free access to content while charging a fee for printing digital content. The company pays a share of this fee to publishers. Warnock said that the site now offers access to the full text of more than 20,000 books and more than 15,000 reports, maps, sheet music and other documents. The site now offers content from more than 175 publishers, including about 15 new publisher-branded databases, such as Dun & Bradstreet, Harris Infosource and others.

Ebrary has about 30 employees in offices in California and New York City. "We've had to weather a bad economy, so we've tried to be intelligent about it and stay relatively lean," Warnock said. "But we're looking to add staff in the coming year. We've got new publishers and new projects set to come online in the next year and all indications point to continued growth."