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Technology Stocks : NetLibrary Inc. - EBKS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Xenogenetic who wrote (1)	9/14/2000 10:10:15 AM
From: Glenn Petersen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4

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