JOINING A DIGITAL LIBRARY
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, December 10, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: Column

 For SUNDAY release
 (Linda Seebach is an editorial writer for the Denver
 Rocky Mountain News.)

 Edition: 

 My home library grew by 2,500 books last week. It
 didn't cost me a penny, and I didn't have to buy any
 more bookcases. I signed up with netLibrary.com.

 The Boulder, Colo., company, started in 1998 by
 Timothy Schiewe, is betting that books delivered online
 will rival, if not supplant, the dead-tree sort. Its principal
 business is buying the rights to online distribution of
 books from publishers, and selling them to libraries,
 especially research libraries.

 It has signed up some 700 libraries in its first year. But
 individual customers can read books in the public domain
 for free, which is what I registered to do, or have access
 to the whole collection for $29.95 a year. It has more
 than 8,000 books in the collection and is adding them at
 the rate of 50 a day, a rate company officials say will
 soon rise to 200 a day.

 Maybe reading on screen doesn't sound as cozy as
 curling up with a good book and a cop of hot cocoa, but
 Schiewe has persuaded at least a few players that he's on
 to something.

 The company has raised more than $100 million in three
 rounds of venture-capital financing, which makes it a
 leader among Colorado start-ups. The Wall Street Journal
 took notice with a company profile in November, and
 The New York Times featured netLibrary last week in a
 story on digital publishing.

 The company's software is designed to reassure both
 publishers and librarians that copyrights will be respected.
 Someone who checks out a netLibrary book from a
 participating library can read it as much as he wants, and
 even make marginal notes, but can copy or print only
 limited portions. And the libraries can check out at one
 time only as many copies as they have bought.

 But the e-copies can still be used more efficiently than
 paper ones.

 Dennis Dillon is head of collections for the library at the
 University of Texas at Austin, which has 6,000 digital
 books in its collection. He told the Times that some of his
 digital titles have been checked out 25 times in two
 months, far above average. And if you ever wrote a term
 paper, you can guess why. Once you've carted a book
 home with you, you may not get around to returning it
 right away, even if you only needed it for half an hour.

 University libraries are perennially running out of space,
 which is not a problem with digital books. Digital books
 will be far more convenient for students, and especially
 students who are taking courses online from distant
 institutions. And as everyone gets more comfortable with
 the idea that books are not necessarily physical objects,
 there will be new ways to buy and sell them.

 In parts, if a professor assigns a chapter or two as
 required reading for a course. Temporarily, if a book is
 used heavily but only for brief periods.

 Schiewe sees his company's market as primarily
 academic, at least at first. "If you need a piece of
 information, you will come to netLibrary, find what you
 need, read it and move on," he told the Journal. The
 initial list of publishers is heavy on university presses,
 though big trade publishers like Houghton Mifflin and
 McGraw-Hill have invested in the company.

 But Schiewe has grander ambitions. He's been heard to
 compare the coming of online book access to the
 development of movable type.

 For that to be true, digital books will need to be as easy
 to read as physical ones. The Gutenberg revolution was
 not just about movable type; after all, the Chinese had
 been using movable type for centuries before Gutenberg.
 It was the way movable type multiplied the efficiency of
 another technology - the alphabet - that brought the
 revolution of mass literacy to Europe.

 I have no objection to reading on a computer screen; it's
 what I do all day at work. If I'm researching material for
 a column, the advantage of being able to search the full
 text of a book greatly outweighs the inconvenience of not
 being able to carry it around with me. But for leisure
 reading, I'll wait until genuinely portable e-books are
 available.

 Once they are, the advantage of convenience will shift
 decisively to digital over paper, especially as more and
 more people have high-speed Internet connections that
 are on all the time.

 Confirmed book buyers like me won't stop buying books,
 any more than people stopped listening to the radio when
 they bought television sets. But we will buy differently.

 I might even go for that $29.95 deal.