GHARIB: Dot.com gold has been hard to find these days but now several companies are heading back to school, hitting the books to brush up on profits.

As Stephanie Woods reports, they are building and marketing online libraries to college students.

STEPHANIE WOODS, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: As college students cram in those final study hours and start to think about summer plans, several start up companies are in high gear building for profit Web based libraries. Start up firm Questia (ph) sells a service to students that for $19.95 a month or $149.95 a year, buys online access to 50,000 textbooks.

TROY WILLIAMS, CEO, QUESTIA: It's enabling someone to do a complex search. You know, when you go into the library, you cannot search the full text of the library. You can only search subject categories or titles. But now what we're saying is you can search for a specific quote or put in five or six different keywords and search the full text of the library and find an exact paragraph that`s relevant and go exactly into that.

WOODS: Questia recently ended a free trial offer and says subscription rates increased fivefold. Xanadu (ph), a spin off of publisher Bell and Howell (BHW), is taking a different approach. Instead of selling directly to students, Xanadu targets professors allowing them to tailor make Web content. Students then buy access to the sites, starting around $20 a class.

LEW GOSSAGE, GENERAL MANAGER, XANADU: It's like an ocean of content and what we've done in an editorial way is really develop nets to catch the right fish that the instructor needs and the student needs.

WOODS: Analysts estimate e-library services to be a $250 million a year business with the potential to triple in the next three years. But some question if companies will find profits from students who are used to free Web content.

BRIAN DOBELL, ANALYST, CSFB: Can you make these students pay for what they perceive might not be a value added product? I think the key is going to be to differentiate between just going onto the Web and searching and finding content with actually going to one of these services.

WOODS: Xanadu's Gossage acknowledges marketing to the college crowd is an uphill battle.

GOSSAGE: Students, unless you're selling Coca Cola, music and pizza, are really a very tough audience to sell anything to.

WOODS: Williams believes some students will find Questia's direct access approach valuable.

WILLIAMS: There's a lot of great libraries out there, a lot of great institutions. But there's a lot of students at community colleges or other institutions with very small inadequate libraries.

WOODS: Terry Ann Sayler manages the main library at the University of Maryland. She says much of what Questia and Xanadu have to offer they already have. Her challenge is letting students and professors know about it.

TERRY ANN SAYLER, MANAGER, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND LIBRARY: When you've got the world wide web making it look so easy to find information, libraries have a hard job trying to sell what they've already done and put up available on their web sites.

WOODS: A number of companies are building and marketing libraries on the Internet, including Net Library (ph) and E-Bary (ph). Analysts say if any of these companies make it, it'll take two or three years to figure out who in the industry will make the grade.

Stephanie Woods, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, College Park, Maryland.