Forbes.com had some positive things to say about this deal last month:
forbes.com
August 24, 2000
Positive Whispers On NetLibrary Offering
By Jennifer Godwin
NEW YORK. 11:10 AM EDT-Stephen King's literary horrorfests may nab the
spotlight, but NetLibrary is hoping the real excitement in electronic
books will come from a more mundane business--selling reference
libraries to academic and corporate collections.
Founded in June 1998, NetLibrary (proposed nasdaq ticker: EBKS) is one
of several companies trying to make an early splash in the e-book
market. Its customers are not tech-savvy individuals, but 1,100
libraries like the University of Texas at Austin, Cleveland Public
Library and the NYLink public libraries in New York.
The Boulder, Colo., company filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission on Aug. 17 to raise $82 million in a Nasdaq public offering.
The date of the offering, the exact number of shares and the price per
share were undisclosed. NetLibrary has $70 million in venture backing
from Houghton Mifflin (nyse: HTN), McGraw-Hill (nyse: MHP), Liberty
Digital (nasdaq: LDIG) and others. Its net loss attributable to common
stock for the first six months of 2000 was $31.4 million on $4.3 million
in revenue.
"We've chosen a sector of the e-book business where digital means
value-added," says President Robert Kaufman. "The ability to store more
books on a PC is interesting, but we're really focused on providing
books where there is a cost benefit to adding audio, video, live Web
links, searching and highlighting."
Rather than hiring a librarian to manage a bulky paper book collection,
NetLibrary hopes libraries will elect to order topic-specific digital
files. There is no loss, theft or damage to e-books and users have the
ability to provide access to information any time of the day or night.
That's great for universities that want to offer distance learning
programs. And for corporations looking to cheaply educate their work
forces with the latest specialty books. The company is just beginning to
sign corporate customers like ABC News, AT&T (nyse: T) and Sun
Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW).
NetLibrary sells its customers permanent access to 22,000 copyrighted
electronic texts grouped into subject areas. Want a collection of
computer science books but don't want the burden of warehousing hundreds
of quickly outdated guides to programming in Perl? Order the Computer
Science package for about $17,500. Users get 470 references on
applications and operating systems, and the company doesn't have to pay
anyone to shelve or retrieve them.
NetLibrary's outright purchase plan differs from many subscription-based
e-book businesses, which rent content for a limited amount of time. It
is trying to cast its books as permanent library assets, ephemeral as
they may seem in their digital format. Visitors can explore the free
public domain collection of 4,000 texts at the "Experience eBooks"
section of NetLibrary's Web site.
NetLibrary will be entering the textbook space in the fall with a new
enterprise called Metatext, offering electronic versions of college
textbooks. The company also provides texts prepped for handheld devices
through its subsidiary Peanut Press. In June NetLibrary and Xerox (nyse:
XRX) announced a plan for an on-demand book printing and binding system
using in-store kiosks.
"They've got teams working in the Philippines keying in manuscripts.
They know what it takes to build a delivery mechanism for the
educational market," says Seamus McAteer, a Jupiter Communications
analyst in New York.
Based on early whispers, NetLibrary's debut on the public market should
have a happier ending than the average King novel |
