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.

Ebrary.com, for example, allows people to view all of their online material for free, but then charges for each page users print and each section of a work they copy and paste. The funds from that copy fee will be split between Ebrary and the publishing house, which then has the right to decide how much should go to the author of the work, says Marriott.

By contrast, Questia.com has a flat monthly fee of $19.95, which enables members to access over 40,000 books and 5,000 journal articles, all of which can be printed and copied with no additional charge.

“You could actually read these cover-to-cover,” said Helen Y. Wilson, director of marketing and communications for Questia.

Both sites will also offer online reference tools like encyclopedias and dictionaries.

They plan to target students and academic professionals with their availability of what Marriott calls “authoritative info on the web.”

Questia and Ebrary are hoping that the fear of unregulated content on the Web will convince people to use and pay for their library services in order to ensure accurate and scholarly information.

In order to get material to put on their sites, the online libraries have made partnerships with a myriad of corporate publishers and university presses.

The new deal with Ebrary includes material of twelve major universities, including MIT, Stanford, Columbia, and the University of California. Questia is partnered with over 200 publishers, including the university presses of Harvard and Yale and the Harvard Law Review Association.

—Pat M. Regan contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Garrett M. Graff can be reached at ggraff@fas.harvard.edu.