Editor’s Note: We don’t often talk yearbooks around here, although yearbooks are a big part of college media at many schools. So here’s a post for those yearbook advisers and students out there. Bryan Michael is president of Digital Data Online. I interviewed him yesterday, Jan. 9, via Google Talk. The company he runs provides a service that provides scanning of old yearbooks for colleges and universities and hosts the scanned yearbooks at e-yearbook.com. If you are interested in the services of e-yearbook, you can contact Michael at bryan.michael@gmail.com. This is an edited transcript of our conversation.

ICM: Why don’t you start off telling us about your company and what you’re trying to do with yearbooks.

Bryan Michael: The name of the company is Digital Data Online, Inc. and today we operate a website called www.e-yearbook.com We see this website a first of many to come where we “web-enable” useful content.

We partner with the copyright owners of the content so that we have rights to distribute the content on the Internet using only the “Approved Uses” as specified in our content license agreement. This way the copyright owners maintain control over how the content gets distributed online. We offer several major benefits to the copyright owners who partner with us.

First, they get their entire archive digitized free of charge. Preserving the collection electronically is a major goal of most content providers we work with.

Second, we share a significant percent of all revenue generated by the copyright owner’s content. In most cases these funds go to support the current publications business.

Finally, at least in the case of yearbooks, we believe by putting the old yearbooks online we can raise the profile of the yearbook program and help build awareness of the importance if this publication.

ICM: Lots of questions there … first, how do you make money?

Bryan Michael: We make money in a variety of ways. First, we offer consumers subscription services to search and browse the content online. The subscription is offered as a monthly or yearly service. Also, later this year, we will begin providing a service to order prints of the content. We are even talking with a print company about offering reprints of the entire yearbook (although it would not be exactly like the original).

We also plan to offer services to various businesses. For example, we believe major broadcast and journalism outlets would pay a fee to be able to search and browse the content online. The yearbooks offer a unique database of information and photos that we believe companies like ESPN, Sports Illustrated and others would be interested in. We recently digitized some early 1970’s yearbooks from Ole Miss which had some great pictures of Archie and Olivia Manning (Archie won the Heisman as a quarterback and they are the parents of Peyton and Eli). We also believe other major publishers like the NYT, etc. would pay to use this resource.

Finally, we believe that government agencies like the FBI and Secret Service would pay to use the database online. Currently these entities must send agents into the field to lookup information in these old yearbooks by hand. It’s costly, time consuming and error prone to do this in the offline world. With our service they can instantly keyword search the entire database over the Internet. As an example, one of the London suicide bus bombers from a couple years back briefly attended one of the schools we work with. At that time the FBI came on campus looking through the old yearbooks to try and find any information. Other schools I’ve talked with have confirmed that it is not uncommon for the government to request these resources.

ICM: And how many schools are you working with right now? there are only a few on the front page of your site.

Bryan Michael: We have signed up over a fourth of the top 50 schools (by enrollment size) and should more than double this number in the coming months. It takes time to get all the approvals needed within a particular school but now that we many of them signed up it seems to be getting easier.

ICM: How long have you been working on this particular project (e-yearbooks)? And are you being selective in what schools can participate (enrollment wise?.

Bryan Michael: The company is just over 2 years old. We are not being selective in which schools we work with; however, most of our efforts to date have been with large schools since they have much bigger archives.

ICM: So if a small private school were to contact you, you would negotiate with them? Is there a cost to the school?

Bryan Michael: Currently there is no cost to our program. However, we will be making a few modifications to our business terms starting in March. At that time we will ask the schools to help cover some minor costs. For example, we will ask the schools to cover the shipping cost to deliver the yearbooks to our location for digitization. We will still cover the return shipping costs. Also, if the school wants the images on DVD we will ask them to cover the cost for time and material to burn the images on the DVDs.

ICM: Looking at the technology side, scanning is a pretty time-intensive process. How long does it take you to scan a 200-page book? Are they hi-res scans? (those are two questions, I know).

Bryan Michael: We have a couple of methods we use to scan the books (basically two different types of equipment). The slower equipment operates at about 150-200 pages / hour. The faster equipment is about twice as fast. The images are captured at 300 dpi which is a high resolution that can be used to make prints, etc. These hi-res images are then re-processed into smaller images for the website. The most time consuming aspect is the post-processing, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and proofing of the OCR results. So, to answer your question, a 200-page book could take up to 8 hours when you include this entire (end-to-end) process- but only about an hour of that is actually scanning the yearbook.

ICM: With the OCR, I assume that’s for the search functions.

Bryan Michael: Yes - that is correct. The OCR recognizes the text on the images so that we can then index that text into our search engine.

ICM: So the schools that you have as clients, have you been able to get their entire yearbook archives scanned?

Bryan Michael: Not yet - we still have a lot of scanning to do. Depending on the size of the archive it can take up to a year. A lot of this time is spent on shipping the yearbooks back and forth since we usually do only a box or two at a time. For schools that are OK with sending more yearbooks per shipment it can go much quicker.

ICM: Now, I’m assuming you take the yearbooks apart to scan them (unless there’s a magical scanner that does 200 pages an hour of a bound book!). Do you put them back together when they’re done? What’s the process there?

Bryan Michael: We do not take the yearbooks apart with our process. In fact, the yearbooks are not harmed or damaged in any way. This is an important aspect to our technology since many of the schools do not have extra copies of these yearbooks and do not want them taken apart, etc. The high speed scanning equipment simply takes high resolution digital pictures of each page (using a high end digital camera).

ICM: So someone is manually opening the pages?

Bryan Michael: Yes - with the high speed equipment someone manually turns the pages and takes the pictures. There are some devices today with robotic arms that automatically turn the pages but we do not use this primarily because we want to be more careful with the older books.

ICM: so I’m trying to picture this in my head. It’s more a digital photo reproduction than a flatbed scan, right?

Bryan Michael: Yes - but we use both types of equipment. The image resolution comes out to be the same.

ICM: So what’s the cost to an average joe customer to use your site?

Bryan Michael: Right now we have two options - monthly and yearly. Monthly is $4.95/month with a minimum 3 month commitment. Yearly is $29.95. We plan to add other pricing options later this year that will include single school access only.

ICM: How has the response been from colleges so far? Obviously, you’ve garnered a few partners.

Bryan Michael: The response has been great; however, I still feel that there are a lot of schools out there that don’t know about us. I’m hoping that as we add more schools the word will get out and we can grow more quickly. Thankfully we have had a positive experience with all the schools we are working with thus far (please contact me if anyone reading this does not agree!).

ICM: where is the company located?

Bryan Michael: We are located in Silicon Valley (part of the San Francisco Bay Area).

ICM: What’s the staff size?

Bryan Michael: We have a small team of seven people (some of whom work part time).

ICM: there are some analysts who are thinking that we are in a “web 2.0 bubble.” what’s your financial situation. i.e., as a school, what’s my assurance that my yearbooks will be online for the foreseeable future?

Bryan Michael: We don’t really see ourselves as a web 2.0 company - for example, none of our content today is “user-generated” (like the many social networking sites out there - a la Facebook, etc). Also, our target market for this content is the older, online crowd (the baby boomers). In terms of our financial situation, we are currently backed by private investors (not Venture Capital). I think this gives us more flexibility than if we had VC’s on our Board. Anyway, the great thing is that even if our company was to go under (which I don’t think we will), the schools get all the images and could do whatever they want with them. There really is no financial risk to the school and they get free digitization of the archive (worth thousands of dollars).

ICM: BTW, before you go, did you work on your student media? or did anyone else on your staff? i.e., where did the idea come from?

Bryan Michael: I just got the idea while looking through some of my old yearbooks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 8:32 am and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.