Questia, an online library catering to students and researchers, has launched an iPhone app offering access to 76,000 books and 2.7 million periodical articles for a monthly subscription fee.
According to the company, research librarians selected each book and periodical in the collection with the goal of creating the ultimate liberal arts library and solving a little-acknowledged book-scarcity problem: Even if you have access to a library containing a particular book, someone else might have checked it out. And even if the book is available, there may not be a way to search it electronically.
Questia's goal is to offer academics a deeper and more authoritative archive than what's available on the public internet, for the right price.
"The researcher does not want to purchase books, because the value proposition is wrong – they cannot pay $10 to $40 per book to own them, when they need to cite 10 sources in a research project… they want to use it like they would their school library -- if their school library had this kind of content, and most don't," said Questia CEO Tim Harris.
Questia charges $10 per month for one topic or $20 for all topics in its library. The iPhone app costs 99 cents for permanent access to 5,000 books and a one-week trial of the full service.
Rival Google Books, which offers pre-1923 public domain content for free, plans to charge per-book fees ranging $10 and up for newer eBooks starting next year, according to Harris. That pricing model is fine for cover-to-cover readers, but far too expensive for students and researchers looking to cite specific passages.
In that sense, the subscription model seems as if it were made for academic research.
Questia's iPhone app also offers research tools, including a highlighter, margin notes that researchers can refer back to later, unlimited bookmarks, the ability to add books to a virtual book rack and the ability to search the whole library (or certain sections) from a single box, whether on the Questia website or the iPhone app. As for the tedium of putting together a bibliography once a student is done with their research, Questia generates one automatically – yet another reason to envy the students of today.
About 325 participating publishers have licensed books to Questia.
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