Twelve major university publishing houses—including Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—signed agreements last month to publish many of their works online with Ebrary.com, a start-up company competing to deliver academic content free-of-charge to Internet users.

Harvard University Press (HUP), by contrast, has inked an agreement with Questia.com to provide the competing online library with material from the press’ vast collection of written works.

HUP did not return calls for comment this week.

Questia, Ebrary and Netlibrary—the three largest online library content providers—are racing to get as much of the world’s written texts digitized and placed on their websites as possible.

Most of the books covered in the recent deal with Ebrary are from the mid-1990s.

However, many publishers still express hesitation over mass publishing on the Web of their copyrighted books in the wake of Napster, the popular digital music sharing program that suffered a debilitating injunction this spring after a lengthy court battle with the recording industry. The industry charged that Napster had enabled millions of users to trade copyrighted music online.

“Publishers are willing to put their material on the Net as long as there’s no ‘Napster-effect,’” said Patricia Marriott, Ebrary’s Vice President of Marketing.

The new online libraries hope to prevent such bootleg copies of books by regulating use and charging a membership fee—either a flat per-month fee or a pay-per-service fee.