OverDrive Gears Up for Digital Content
Over the past year, the promising digital
rights management industry—a diverse group of companies with various approaches
to unlocking, delivering, and protecting intellectual property on the
Internet—has suffered its share of setbacks, along with other start-up
technology companies.
The industry, dubbed DRM, has the potential to
give consumers books, audio material, and videos that have so far not been
legally available online. Unfortunately, many of these companies went under in
2001 and 2002, leaving a handful of tenacious survivors to break this exciting
new ground.
One of those survivors has, appropriately enough, been
around longer than most. Founded in 1986 to sell software to accounting and law
publishers, OverDrive Inc. has become one of the leaders in the industry. It has
four primary business units: data conversion, software development for
enterprise-level portals and online retail storefronts, electronic books, and
digital rights management.
In each of its ventures, OverDrive operates
solely in the business-to-business space, meaning that all of their customers
are institutions or retailers purveying wares to another set of consumers.
OverDrive has built relationships with universities, university presses,
publishers, booksellers, and other clients.
At the moment, most of
OverDrive's publisher relationships exist to sell books to general audiences.
Ironically, the textbook and academic publishing industry, which has a built-in
computer-dependent audience, has been slower to embrace e-books. According to
Pamela Turner, OverDrive's director of content, "Most academic publishers have
been concentrating on the library market more than the retail buyer" when it
comes to electronic content. "However, that has begun to change."
Indeed, more and more academic e-texts are becoming available. Rovia Inc., a
company based in Boston, now offers e-books in 23 disciplines, and companies
like OverDrive are partnering with publishers to deliver packaged e-book
content. OverDrive is also working with several leading textbook publishers to
provide students with books compatible with Microsoft Corp.'s Reader and Adobe
Systems Inc.'s Acrobat eBook Reader.
Among OverDrive's customers are
Purdue University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University
Press. Wiley, Houghton Mifflin Co., and Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing
Group have also partnered with the company, primarily to sell electronic
versions of their study guides and ancillary materials.
In addition to
working with publishers, OverDrive has partnered with Follett Corp., the
textbook distributor with bookstores in most states and Canada. OverDrive posted
Follett's numerous study guides online and is the developer of Follett's new
online bookstore (shop.efollett.com/htmlroot/
bookstore/eBooks.jsp), which
lists hundreds of electronic titles. Most are trade books, but many are
appropriate for course adoption. The site also includes several dozen study
guides and support products for students.
"Our partnership with
OverDrive has been good for [us]," said Sharon Fredi, director of digital
projects for Follett Higher Education Group. "OverDrive's Content Reserve makes
it very efficient to source digital content for our eBookstore—it's one-stop
shopping for e-books from a large number of publishers. By also providing an
interface to the publisher-supplied marketing information and metadata to aid in
merchandising our e-books, OverDrive offers all the services we need for a
successful e-bookstore."
OverDrive's Content Reserve, called a "global
digital content marketplace," is a repository for content providers. The content
provider/publisher uploads a single copy of each title and all associated
marketing, pricing, and DRM information into the Content Reserve account. This
is a secure location from which the publisher sells to retailers.
In
turn, e-book retailers can build a catalog of titles by drawing from those in
the Content Reserve. Content Reserve manages the copyright and distribution
issues for each title as well. Through this service, e-book publishers and
retailers can open an account, manage their inventory, and get an instant record
of sales and transaction activity. All that is required is a PC, an Internet
connection, and a Web browser.
In addition to the DRM and content management
sides of the e-book business, OverDrive is also an active player in electronic
publishing. According to founder and chief executive officer Steve Potash, the
company began its life as an e-books provider, supplying software that allowed
publishers to move content onto diskettes. Now, OverDrive is a leader in this
area, with three distinct products.
BookWorks software can be used to
produce electronic books on CD-ROM. It includes full-text indexing, a search
engine, and the tools to create navigational maps and trees, giving users the
ability to manage intellectual content easily. All data is in a single
compressed file complete with hyperlinks, graphics, tables, maps, trees, and a
text index. The viewer for BookWorks is based on Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
It also has an SQL engine for publishing databases. Another module, BookWorks
DNA, is a software system designed to protect copyrighted material, text,
images, and other digital files for secure distribution and sale.
OverDrive Connect is a tool that content providers can use to extend the value
of their content by allowing it to be converted instantly into e-book material.
When content owners add the OverDrive Connect link to their Web sites, users can
instantly convert and download pages from content found on the Internet or an
intranet into portable e-books.
The tool converts pages, articles, or
entire sections of material to Microsoft Reader format for portable reading on a
desktop PC, notebook computer, or Pocket PC. Content owners can then deploy DRM
to protect the converted content. OverDrive Connect is available at several Web
sites, including Fathom Knowledge Network's online educational site (www.fathom.com).
Formatted e-books
have the potential to do away with the traditional photocopied coursepak. Under
an initiative with the University of Ph'enix, OverDrive software will deliver
all of the university's distance learning course content; there will be no print
materials in the program.
OverDrive also sells ReaderWorks, a tool used to
convert Microsoft Word documents into Microsoft Reader books for distribution
via the Web. And finally, OverDrive's eBookExpress is a free service that allows
anyone to build a basic e-book.
For more information on OverDrive, visit www.overdrive.com. For more
information on eBookExpress, visit www.overdrive.com/click2build.asp.