netLibrary

» see netlibrary.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

netLibrary sold to institutions rather than to people, so whether you ever used it was settled by a committee before you arrived. I went through university in Turkey between 2003 and 2010 and I could not tell you today whether my library had a netLibrary subscription. That is not really a memory failure. The whole design of the thing assumed the reader would never learn the vendor's name.

The company began operating in Boulder in july 1998, digitized its first book in january 1999, and sold its first title that may. The pitch to publishers was that a library ebook would behave exactly like a library paper book, and that promise is the only reason any publisher signed. One institution bought one copy. One patron at a time could open it. When the loan expired the file closed itself and the copy returned to the shelf, a shelf that was a row in a database.

Investors read the same arrangement as a land grab and put in something like $130 million. By early 2000 netLibrary was valued at $450 million and was the brightest thing in Boulder's small dot-com constellation, with more than forty thousand titles under contract from three hundred publishers and 230 people on the payroll. It had also bought Peanut Press in february 2000, which put books on Palm handhelds and was the closest thing to a consumer business it ever owned.

The reading experience is the part worth remembering, because it was terrible in an instructive way. You read in a browser window over a dial-up or campus connection, a page at a time, with printing limited and the session timing out if you went to make tea. Meanwhile the same text existed as an unrestricted PDF on somebody's ftp server. netLibrary was engineering scarcity into a file that had none, on purpose, because scarcity was what the publishers were selling.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the collapse ~

On 15 october 2001 the company admitted it was running out of money. The staff went from 230 to about 130 inside a month. On 19 november 2001 netLibrary filed for chapter 11 in Colorado, and OCLC, the nonprofit library cooperative in Ohio, announced on the same day that it wanted to buy everything.

That speed was not opportunism so much as damage control. Six thousand libraries had already paid for netLibrary books, and if the servers went dark those collections evaporated with them. Bankruptcy documents put OCLC's offer at $10 million, less than three percent of the peak valuation, and the court approved it in january 2002. Peanut Press went separately to Palm.

~ the second owner ~

OCLC ran netLibrary for eight years and added audiobooks to it. It never covered its own costs. A cooperative owned by libraries turned out not to be the right vehicle for a content platform competing with commercial vendors, and in march 2010 OCLC signed the collection over to EBSCO Publishing, along with the operation still sitting in Boulder.

EBSCO had no reason to keep a second platform alive. The content was rebuilt into EBSCOhost, where the company already sold databases to the same libraries, and the migration completed in july 2011. Libraries were warned to save their usage statistics first, since none of that history would survive the move. The interface went away and the name went with it.

~ the inheritance ~

The idea won even though the company lost. Every library ebook you borrow today, through OverDrive or whatever else your library pays for, still works the way netLibrary decided it should in 1999: a licensed copy with a queue behind it, and a file that expires on its own. A digital object was deliberately given the limits of a physical one, and twenty-five years later nobody has managed to argue their way out of it.

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