E-books Do Have a Future, Not the One You Think Though: A Year in Review at Cyberlibris
Do you believe in e-books? Not really. You may be right. You may be wrong too. You are right; so far e-books have been poor substitutes to Gutenberg. Things are changing though. A smart company (no it's not Google Print!) is giving e-books a new lease of life: Cyberlibris' digital library has convinced international publishers and thousands of users worldwide.
Paris, France (PRWEB) January 23, 2006 --People are still wondering whether the book has a future on the web. Indeed, e-book sales have not fared as well as expected. The publishing industry is still in search of a proper business model for its content on Internet, one that achieves a sound balance between a wider access to electronic content by more users and the legitimate protection of intellectual property. As the hiccups of the music industry and tons of illegal music download indicate, the business roadmap for electronic content delivery is far from clear.
Still, a French company named Cyberlibris ( seems to have found the right recipe. Cyberlibris, founded in 2001, has become a favorite outlay for worldwide book publishers such as Berrett-Koehler, Blackwell Publishing, Dalloz, Dunod, Gualino, Elsevier Science and Technology, John Wiley & Sons, Thomson-Southwestern and many others. Its very focused business approach has seduced leading international publishing houses.
As former business school dean, turned investment banker and Cyberlibris co-founder, Eric Briys, puts it: “We do not want to be everything to everybody. My dream from day one was to allow both business school students and faculty to get rid of what I call the single required textbook tyranny. And, I know no better solution to this challenge than a carefully crafted digital library where professors can share their expert knowledge with students. Our objective is not to defeat Gutenberg. This is a wrong battle which explains why the e-book as we know it does not trigger much enthusiasm. We want to defeat knowledge rationing in business schools!”
Cyberlibris’ story is a case in point. It has gathered more than 6,000 business and economics textbooks (in French and in English) in electronic format and structured a digital library around these books currently used by thousands of users in more than 10 countries. Cyberlibris’ main objective is not content aggregation per se. As Briys says “Aggregation is a self-defeating proposition. What you want is 1/ that subscribers do not end up overwhelmed by content (for that you need filtering) and 2/ that subscribers get to discover the hidden part of the iceberg (the so-called “long tail”).”
Easily said, not easily done but, indeed a message that publishing houses are keen on listening to. That is why more and more are partnering with Cyberlibris. Publishers say that Cyberlibris has shown them that Internet is no longer synonym of content for free or wild piracy. The fear of sales cannibalization has proved unfounded. Publishers now make money from places where they had hard times selling books. Authors value the fact that they obviously get more royalties but above all that their work reaches the people it was intended to.
One of the main features of Cyberlibris’ approach is its parsimony. As the Head Librarian of Euromed-Marseilles puts it, “Cyberlibris does not take anything for granted. They do not believe in grand schemes. They believe in users and they always take a very user centric view of things. They want our schools to deliver pedagogy more efficiently, in a way that is more appealing to Internet and PlayStation bred students. Sometimes it is challenging for professors who were used to adopting one book only for the whole class duration and sticking to that book for years!”
Cyberlibris has a permanent concern that users reach relevant content. “This is almost an obsession”, says Briys. To improve content knowledge Cyberlibris has asked leading scholars to publish their ideal libraries, something they are surprisingly enough rarely asked for. Scholars, like McGill University Henry Mintzberg, HEC Jean-Noël Kapferer, Solvay Business School André Farber, have joined the bandwagon.
2005 has been a year of significant traction for Cyberlibris. Indeed, 2005 has translated into:
1/ A 100% subscribers retention rate. This has been the case since Cyberlibris went live in 2003,
2/ A steady flow of new subscriptions from business schools around the world (France, Belgium, Monaco, Switzerland, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Congo, Mexico)
3/ A steadily growing catalog of books shaped according to users’ specific requests,
4/ Significant spikes in usage associated to a significant increase in the number of pedagogical bookshelves created by professors,
5/ The addition of new content resources through an intensive use of RSS feeds,
6/ The creation of blogs for faculty members,
7/ The addition of new tools, chief among them automatic scanning based on users’ own keyword selection,
8/ The launch of a new executive service, Cyberlibris Executive already in place at Danone ( Krauthammer, Fideo Conseil among others.
François Lascaux, Cyberlibris’ Managing Director, views “2005 as a tipping point. We have been working hard to align planets, that is authors, publishers, content, users (be they students, professors, managers), technology and, of course, money. E-books do have a future: This future is intimately linked to digital libraries.”
The full year in review at
About Cyberlibris: Cyberlibris is a privately held company based in Paris, France. It was founded in 2001. It is funded by Monceau Assurances, a French mutual insurance company. It currently operates two services: Cyberlibris Academia and Cyberlibris Executive.