Whether you sell content directly, or provide it as a value-added service, content IS e-commerce, don''t kid yourself about that.

The problem, of course, is that content is expensive to provide. It needs to be good, and it needs either to be replenished frequently, as in news, or to be highly specialized, as in certain types of in-depth news (financial, for example) or the sort of detail found only in books and journals.

It requires talented people to produce quality content, and folks like that occasionally want to get paid.

Maybe because the Internet first developed as more or less of a free frontier, lots of people seem reluctant to pay for content online - even people who don''t think twice about buying a newspaper. So online ads are required.

Since most e-commerce companies need to advertise to get noticed, it should all work out rather nicely -- except, of course, when it doesn''t.

Clearly the more specific the content, the more likely some people are to pay for it. Enter an outfit called ebrary.com, a soon-to-launch source for online research with a new business model, one that I found intriguing.

Ebrary says it is "creating a collection of authoritative and valuable content encompassing books, journals, maps, periodicals and digitally archived material, most of which was previously inaccessible via the Web."

The cool thing is that Internet users visiting ebrary can have access to this content via a proprietary search engine without having to obtain a membership or pay subscription fees.

So how does the company make their bucks? Well, looking is free, but if you copy it, you have to pay for it.

The company says the pay-to-view model limits the market to those willing to make blind purchases. The subscription-based model forces users to purchase pre-bundled amounts of unwanted content in order to obtain small amounts of wanted content.

But ebrary provides users with a new way to acquire information, by enabling the copying of text or printing of pages for a photocopier-like fee. It''s a new revenue stream for publishers, authors and information providers. The model uses technology that prohibits unpaid reproduction (pasting, printing, and downloading).

By increasing the exposure of copyright-protected material, ebrary says it encourages the purchase of either the physical or electronic version of titles viewed from a choice of online or local bookstores. With the ebrary model, participating publishers and information providers may determine the degree of access and costs associated with each of their titles.

This idea is cool enough that ebrary just won a round of simultaneous joint financial investment in the company by Random House Inc., Pearson and The McGraw-Hill Companies. Financial specifics were not disclosed, but the deal marks the first time three of the big five publishers have invested in the same company.

ebrary''s InfoTools plug-in enables researchers to directly access information from the Internet including definitions, translations, encyclopedic references and maps to better understand the material they are reading.

"The fact that this is the first-ever co-investment by three major publishers in this space demonstrates the broad range of support for ebrary''s model and philosophy," said Christopher Warnock, Chief Executive Officer of ebrary.

"ebrary is now poised, with the help of our partners, to finally make the content of books, periodicals and other traditionally printed documents accessible to everyone on the Internet in a manner that benefits publishers, libraries, booksellers and Internet users, while protecting the authors'' copyrights."

Who''s the competition? One similar operation is a start-up company called Questia, which says it is "a company that will deliver on the true promise of the Internet by providing access to the wealth of human knowledge."

Questia says on its site that it "is building the first online service to provide unlimited access to the full text of hundreds of thousands of books, journals and periodicals, as well as tools to easily use this information."

The Questia service says it will be will be live in early 2001 with at least 50,000 of "the most valued volumes in the liberal arts from the 20th and 21st centuries (not including textbooks)."

Anyone can search Questia at no cost to locate books and journals. But to experience the ease and convenience of online viewing of full text and to use the research tools of the Questia service, users must subscribe.

Either way, pay-per-use or pay via subscription, I hope these models work out. I, for one, am constantly wanting to research something, and although I store a lot of stuff electronically, my printer is often my best friend when I work online.

If content can''t be king, here''s hoping that it can at least be a prince.