The Future of Online Research

Every day, 100 million Internet users conduct more than 200 million information searches at Web sites like Yahoo!, yet traditional books have almost no presence in this new information exchange. A new e-property, the sBook can change this imbalance while creating an entirely new subscription revenue source for publishers.

Quality online information

Today, 97 percent of Internet users visit the Web to search for some bit of information. Log on to AOL or another ISP (Internet Service Provider), type in a few keywords and get a list of several dozen possible Web sites that may or may not contain the information you're seeking. If the goal is to thoroughly research a topic, current services like Yahoo!, Google, Altavista or TerraLycos are woefully inadequate. Since none of these household brands are owned or driven by traditional publishers, the links they present are largely unvetted and seldom provide access to quality opinion journals and magazines.

The marketplace

Several publishers actually supply the tools for Internet searching (McGraw-Hill Dush-kin's PowerWeb and Springer's LINK, for example), but in general, the book industry has not embraced this approach to e-publishing, and there remains a blatant disconnect between book users and Internet users.

At close range, the Internet audience virtually mimics the traditional book consumer, particularly in professional and higher education trade sectors. More than 85 percent of college students are Internet users, and presumably, most book users are, too. A ready solution for publishers lies in an innovative technology that creates a new property altogether, the sBook. The sBook employs Orthogonal Corpus Indexing that turns professional, reference and higher educational books in any language into highly accurate Internet search direct-ories.

The sBook also has the advantage of protecting traditional book content online, at the same time filling the need for better vetted vertical searches. The sBook offers a table of contents and index to guide Internet users to sources of information. Its "directory pages" offer links to information sources—like public Web links (standard search offerings), magazine and journal articles and books—and consumers can search by keywords.