Librarian's eBook Newsletter

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 experience 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.

A library can choose to subsidize its patrons' print/copy transaction fees or require each patron to pay for his/her own fees via credit card. The print/copy fees would be in addition to whatever fees a library may already be charging for printing within the library. In addition to the print/copy fees, the library is charged a flat service fee based on FTE and library type.

Unlike netLibrary, ebrary has been quick to see the value in providing free MARC records with embedded URLs. Regular MARC record updates are provided as new titles are added to ebrary's collection. Today, ebrary's collection stands at approximately 5,000 ebook titles from over 100 publishers, including Cambridge UP, Elsevier Science, McGraw-Hill and Random House (the complete title list is available upon free registration). The largest concentrations of titles occurs in Business/Economics, Classics, Education, History, Medical, Philosophy and Political Science. Although the title list includes many imprints of 2000 and 2001, this can be somewhat misleading because all of the classics (Dickens, Twain, Emerson) have a 2001 imprint. However, a quick sampling of 80 titles found an average publication date of 1999, which is significantly more recent than the vast majority of Questia's collection.

In 2000, ebrary's "partnership" with libraries included requirements that the library include ebrary on its homepage, place ebrary promotional materials around library public workstations and include ebrary in all bibliographic instruction (see past newsletter article). All of these requirements are now gone. Moreover, ebrarian 2.0 includes some significant functionality improvements over the beta ebrarian 1.0 (see past newsletter article). The InfoPlease Dictionary has been replaced by the much more user-friendly Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and navigation back to a search results list is possible without the reposting of data.

ebrarian 2.0 is currently being piloted at Stanford, Yale and the Peninsula Library System (a 34 library consortium in Northern California). Within the first quarter of 2002, there will be a full roll-out of ebrarian 2.1 to any interested library customers.



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	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 experience 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. A library can choose to subsidize its patrons' print/copy transaction fees or require each patron to pay for his/her own fees via credit card. The print/copy fees would be in addition to whatever fees a library may already be charging for printing within the library. In addition to the print/copy fees, the library is charged a flat service fee based on FTE and library type. Unlike netLibrary, ebrary has been quick to see the value in providing free MARC records with embedded URLs. Regular MARC record updates are provided as new titles are added to ebrary's collection. Today, ebrary's collection stands at approximately 5,000 ebook titles from over 100 publishers, including Cambridge UP, Elsevier Science, McGraw-Hill and Random House (the complete title list is available upon free registration). The largest concentrations of titles occurs in Business/Economics, Classics, Education, History, Medical, Philosophy and Political Science. Although the title list includes many imprints of 2000 and 2001, this can be somewhat misleading because all of the classics (Dickens, Twain, Emerson) have a 2001 imprint. However, a quick sampling of 80 titles found an average publication date of 1999, which is significantly more recent than the vast majority of Questia's collection. In 2000, ebrary's "partnership" with libraries included requirements that the library include ebrary on its homepage, place ebrary promotional materials around library public workstations and include ebrary in all bibliographic instruction (see past newsletter article). All of these requirements are now gone. Moreover, ebrarian 2.0 includes some significant functionality improvements over the beta ebrarian 1.0 (see past newsletter article). The InfoPlease Dictionary has been replaced by the much more user-friendly Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and navigation back to a search results list is possible without the reposting of data. ebrarian 2.0 is currently being piloted at Stanford, Yale and the Peninsula Library System (a 34 library consortium in Northern California). Within the first quarter of 2002, there will be a full roll-out of ebrarian 2.1 to any interested library customers.

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