News

RH, Pearson, MH Make Investment in ebrary.com
Paul Hilts -- 10/16/00
All announced last week that they have made investments in forthcoming online research resource


Ebrary CEO
Christopher Warnock
Random House, Pearson plc and the McGraw-Hill Cos. all announced last week that they had made investments in ebrary.com, a forthcoming online research resource based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Ebrary.com, scheduled to launch this fall, will host a collection of books, journals, periodicals and maps that visitors to the site can browse for free. Revenue comes from patrons paying for materials they download or print out for about the same price as photocopying.
The issue of how to make best use of the Internet, promote access to texts and still protect authors' copyrights has been a vexing one for publishers, authors and librarians. Publishers especially have been concerned about making full texts available on the Internet, because pirated copies could be distributed for free.

"Ebrary addresses several problems at once," Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House Ventures, the investment division of the publishing giant, told PW. "First, this investment gives us the opportunity to support, both financially and strategically, a company that will change the way research is conducted, both by scholars and by ordinary people. Ebrary's pay-per-use model is unrivaled at digitally delivering copyright-protected content. Second, it will help redefine the role of libraries. What is the role of libraries in a digital world, if they can't help provide free access to texts? And finally, it helps bring our authors additional revenue. Right now, when students do their research in libraries, they photocopy pages of material, but the authors never see any of that; the publishers never see it; even the libraries see little of it. Almost all that revenue g s to the copier company. Ebrary provides greater access to more materials while guarding copyrights against unauthorized exploitation, and recovering revenue that was previously lost," he concluded.

Larry Weissman, RHV's director of new business development, added, "This technology [putting text on the Internet via Adobe's PDF format] is ready now; we don't have to wait for prices of devices to come down or for screen technology to improve."

Will Move Beyond Education
Michael Hehir, president of McGraw-Hill Ventures, said, "With nearly all our materials being created digitally, ebrary is another way for the McGraw-Hill Companies to extend its reach in serving customers through the Web." While it was not officially part of the financial deal, MHC has earmarked as many as 100 titles, mostly from its professional and scholarly lists, to contribute to the ebrary library. "I don't think this will remain education-oriented very long," Hehir noted. "I understand part of the plan will be to sell licenses to businesses for use on their corporate intranets."

Christopher Warnock, ebrary's CEO, pointed out that there are no nonpublishing venture capital companies involved at this time. "The fact that this is the first-ever co-investment by three major publishers demonstrates the broad range of support for ebrary's model and philosophy. We knew in the beginning that going only to strategic partners for money would take a lot longer, but it would be worth it, because then we'd have the demonstrated support of our customers."