NetLibrary Lays Off 90 Employees

Posted on April 27, 2001

netLibrary, a provider of ebooks and content management services, announced the company will now accept electronic files meeting OeBF standards directly from publishers or, at the publisher's request, manage the conversion process on behalf of the publisher. Doing so will result in the re-allocation of conversion work to outsource vendors, which will result in a restructuring that reduces the company's headcount by approximately 90 positions. The remaining employee base will be focused more directly on customer and publisher support programs.

netLibrary has been a member of the Open eBook Forum (OeBF) and has actively supported the development of industry standards for the past two years. The company says that adoption of OeBF standards will result in lower cost and faster conversion processes. netLibrary has been looking for ways to cut costs since a previous around of layoffs in March (about 20 employees) and the withdrawal of its IPO bid last December. The company also sold peanutpress.com to Palm, Inc., in March, 2001.

Rob Kaufman, President and CEO of netLibrary, says in the announcement, "This move will enhance our ability to provide our library customers with the quality, current content they desire, while responding to publisher requests encouraging us to align with Open eBook Forum standards. After careful study, we determined this change will benefit our more than 5,000 institutional library customers as well as our 300 internationally known publishers. In addition, it will create efficiencies that will strengthen our business model and allow us to focus more of our resources directly on supporting the publishers and libraries we work with daily."

Conversion processing for the company's MetaText Division will remain unchanged. Several steps in the MetaText conversion process are already being outsourced. Other activities, such as the creation of sample pages and MTML, are too new to outsource at this time and will continue to be performed at netLibrary. Over 5,000 libraries currently access netLibrary ebooks from more than 300 publishers.