Questia: The World's Largest Online Library

Is it Worth the Price of Subscription?

Questia.com bills itself as the world's largest online library. That may very well be true, but then again at the moment it's not saying a whole lot. Provided Google can deal with the multiple lawsuits that are currently standing as a huge obstacle to its plans to digitize millions of books, Questia's library may one day look in comparison like the public library of Podunk compared to the Library of Congress. But not now.

Is it worth paying the price for a subscription to the world's largest online library of the moment? I'm currently in the middle of my one month trial subscription. I'm much happier now than I was a few hours into it. Access is supposed to be immediate upon payment. Rather than paying via credit card, I chose to have my PayPal account debited. Four hours later I still had not been able to login and had not had any of my email inquiries returned. Finally, I called them and the operator-an exceedingly nice young man whose name I unfortunately did not get-handled my situation with aplomb. Within two minutes I had logged in.

Now, the reason I decided to have a go at the world's largest online library is because I'm a freelance writer and I get most of my assignments from internet freelance databases. A lot of what I write requires significant research. As anyone who has ever used the Google Scholar database or any other search engine specializing in academic journals knows, many times what comes back is information that you would kill to use, but to which you have been denied access. Typically, these are highly specific databases containing journals related to, for instance, medical issues, legal issues, educational issues, etc. Normally, anyone can purchase a subscription to these databases, but since they are so occupation-specific, unless you write about that issue frequently it really doesn't make sense to shell out the kind of money they typically cost.