This story appears in the
July 2001 issue of
Startups.
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Christopher Warnock's company may have been 10-plus years in
the making, but then maybe it's true that good things come to
those who wait. The idea to start ebrary Inc. came about in 1989
following a not-so-pleasant trip to the library at the University
of Utah in Salt Lake City, where Warnock was getting his
undergraduate degree. Looking for information on building a
bicycle, he had to search in three different places before he found
the book he wanted-not to mention that half the card catalog was on
the computer, the other half was on cards in the filing cabinet,
and all the older periodicals were on microfiche. After trips to
the third and fourth floors, he finally found the book he wanted in
the basement. As he picked it up, he thought: "Somewhere in
here is the information I need to know. Wouldn't it be
wonderful if at some point all this information were accessible on
the computer?"
Now it's 2001, and Warnock's idea has come to fruition:
Mountain View, California-based ebrary, which will provide software and
services for secure online access and delivery of copyrighted
content, is set to go live within the next few weeks. Together with
co-founder Kevin Sayar, 33, Warnock has formed partnerships with a
number of publishers, who stand to benefit from ebrary in terms of
protecting their copyrighted material and furthering their
marketing efforts via the Internet. "The reason publishers are
willing to go along with this is, if someone wants to copy text or
print pages from a document, we're able to charge them very
small transaction [fees] for the convenience of doing [that],"
says Warnock, 34. "And in this way, we enable the publisher to
recoup revenues potentially lost in the photocopying
market."