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Forbes Magazine Academic Overture
Lynn Cook, Forbes Magazine, 04.02.01

Just before graduating from Harvard Law School in 1998, Troy Williams turned down a lucrative offer from Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Instead, he finished law school and moved to Houston, where he'd gone to college, sleeping in his car for three sweltering nights, looking for an apartment and a way to start a Web education company.

Williams wanted to do for college kids studying the humanities what Westlaw.com does for lawyers: put whole libraries of research material online, accessible at any hour and searchable by titles, subjects, keywords and hyperlinks. You could research a term paper on literature or economics or philosophy and, as you write it, use software to generate footnotes and a bibliography.

Academics loved the idea. But Williams had to go begging for money until Rod Canion, the Compaq cofounder forced out in 1991, helped raise $5 million to start Questia Media. Canion insists Questia has no real competition. You can go to NetLibrary.com and read Beowulf. But it won't give you J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal essay on the Old English epic. Ebrary.com, launching this summer, is willing to post whatever digitized books publishers throw their way.

Canion proved to be a great door-opener, leading Williams to Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay and AOL Vice President of Education Therese Crane, who joined the board. They, in turn, lured Timothy Harris, who had been Compaq's chief technology officer, former University of Pennsylvania provost Stanley Chodorow and Randall Dragon, onetime Disney vice president of technical operations, to help run the show. All of which helped Questia raise $40 million from TA Associates in March 2000 and $90 million six months later from OppenheimerFunds, ta and others-making Questia the most heavily funded online education venture ever.

While Williams was raising money, his 300 employees-software engineers, publishing house expats and librarians-were digitizing 50,000 books (by 2003, 250,000 are expected). Questia gained subsidiary rights from 200 academic presses, including Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Cambridge and the University of Chicago, as well as Pearson Education, the world's largest educational publisher. Williams offered free digital conversions-keeping the original page and line breaks-in exchange for a revenue-sharing arrangement for those texts, based on the number of pages viewed. Total estimated outlay by 2003: $80 million-or $200 to $1,000 to scan and proofread each book.

QuestiaSM is charging students $20 a month for unlimited online access to the collection. Williams figures he can recover his costs in two and a half years if only 5% of the 12.3 million U.S. undergraduates subscribe for six to eight months. Of course, the promise of delivering 5% of a market is the epitaph of many a failed dot-com.

The challenge is to overcome the presumption that anything on the Web ought to be free and to get students to dip into their $200 of average monthly discretionary income. It's cool to be able to search for Adam Smith and the aristocracy, and come up with 5,573 entries-or to read an essay about Huckleberry Finn with six hyperlinks about 19th-century race relations in America. But is it worth giving up beer and pizza?

Some of that venture capital will go into an ad campaign on CBS and cable channels MTV and VH1. It will break during March Madness, just as students procrastinate on papers by watching basketball. Williams has also dispatched 135 people to 400 campuses, offering free coffee and demos of the service. (You can get a free taste of the service's capabilities at www.questia.com.

"I think we will become every bit as indispensable as word processing," says Williams, 28. Can't blame the guy for hoping. Six weeks into the service, how many subscriptions have been sold? Williams won't say.