Online Archives
Source: USA Today
$4.95/Month or Access To Archives of 150 Magazines or Another Reason to Forget the Library
An article about KeepMedia.Com, a new company that Louis Borders is starting. This is the same Mr. Borders who began the chain of bookstores. According to the article, “When it launches later this month, consumers will be able to pay $4.95 a month for access to the archives of 150 publications. You can also get online content from the current issue of a magazine if you buy a print subscription to that magazine. KeepMedia and the publishers will split the revenue from the fees and subscriptions.” Once again a service that’s selling remotely accessible access to material (and much more of it) that public, academic, and other types of libraries are offering patrons for free. Yet it’s companies like KeepMedia and eLibrary that get the media coverage. Sad.
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See Also: In a recent press announcement, Patrick Spain, CEO of Alacritude (they own eLibrary) had the following comments about KeepMedia. “The KeepMedia business model is flawed. I know because I bought a company � eLibrary � with the same business model and we are changing it as quickly as we can. By most accounts, we are a success. We have some 40,000 subscribers who access an archive of 17 million articles from consumer, business and industry publications. If we weren’t developing new products, we would be a nice, profitable little company with limited growth prospects. People, including us, who focus their long-term online business on selling a selection of content will fail. What people want is single point of access to all online content, whether free or paid, utilizing compelling tools to turn that content into useful and actionable answers for their personal or business needs.” I would like to know how many of eLibrary’s 40,000 subscribers are paying for content that they could get for free via a library.
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See Also: PaidContent.Org Has More (this was the first story about the company)

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See Also: Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about regarding libraries offering free remotely accessible access (no need to visit the library building) to thousands of publications and other high-quality databases might want to take a look at a few examples of these services. All you need is a library card for a particular library. Contact your library to find out what you have access to. Here are five examples: NY Public Library, Los Angeles Public Library, King County (Washington) Public Library, Fairfax Cty (Virginia) Public Library, Hamilton (Ontario) Public Library. School, academic, and other types of libraries also provide these services. Make sure to ask them about what’s available!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2003 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.