Questia:

On May 8th, Questia Media laid off 139 employees, reducing its work force to about 140 staff members. Founder Troy Williams explained that Questia was having difficulty raising sufficient additional fundings in order to keep up the pace at which books were being added to the collection. In spite of several intense marketing campaigns, Questia has only been able to recruit approximately 1,000 paying subscribers, though there are several thousand more users with free, trial subscriptions. The reduction in staff would suggest that Questia will not reach its self-imposed goal of a collection of 250,000 titles by 2003.

netLibrary:

netLibrary laid off approximately 90 employees in April. CEO and President Rob Kaufman attributes these layoffs to netLibrary's decision to adopt the Open eBook Specification (OeBF) standards. netLibrary will either accept ebooks in OeBF standards directly from the publishers or else outsource the conversion work to other vendors. According to the press release, it is this outsourcing that resulted in "a restructuring that reduces the company's headcount." So why there were several sales people, who were not engaged in any text conversion work, also laid off? According to Rob Kaufman, the work of these sales people has been replaced by the inclusion of netLibrary's collection into vendor collection development tools, including Blackwell's Collection Manager and Follett's TitleWave. Whether these collection development tools with be an adequate replacement for a human sales force remains to be seen.

netLibrary has launched a new collection development resource, TitleSelect. TitleSelect replaces the need for users to download enormous Excel files with a very user-friendly, web-based interface. netLibrary's entire collection of available titles can be searched by several fields and selected enmasse or on a title-by-title bases. Lists can be saved and order tracked through TitleSelect as well. 

ebrary:

A flurry of ebrary announcements were released in May and early June. Several ebrary partnerships were announced, including the following publishers:

• Columbia University Press
• Marquette University Press
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
• >Perdue University Press
• Springer-Verlag
• Stanford University Press
• University of California Press
• University of Hawaii Press
• University of Nebraska Press
• University of North Carolina Press
• University of Texas Press
• University of Utah Press
• University of Wisconsin Press
• Yale University Press

John Warnock, former CEO of Adobe and father of ebrary founder Christopher Warnock, has joined ebrary's board of directors.
 

1. Carlson, Scott. "Major University Presses Are Signing Deals with a New Online Venture," Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/6/2001