NEW OPPORTUNITIES are created, Troy Williams believes, when entrepreneurs are confronted by a deeply frustrating obstacle.

In Williams’s case, it was trying to find information he needed while living in the small, rural town of North Stonington, Connecticut. Getting books for a history project often meant a long trip to a university and even when he got there the books he wanted might not be available.

Later, when Williams studied history at Rice University, Houston, the library had two million volumes, but that still compared poorly with a library such as Harvard’s which had 15 million books.

Even when he got to Harvard to study law, Williams found that access to books he wanted was far from perfect. Books were often missing or checked out to someone else. “I’m at one of the top libraries in the world and I still can’t get access to books,” he recalls. However, he noticed that all the law cases he wanted were available online.

The solution was clear. Students should be able to get access to university books they needed online 24 hours a day.

After a search he was surprised to find that the sort of online service he wanted for books did not appear to exist.

So instead of accepting the offer of a job in a top Wall Street law firm on $200,000 (£111,000) a year, Williams returned to Houston to form Questia, now one of the world’s largest online repositories of books on the humanities and social sciences.

At the beginning, Williams slept in his car, trying to live on $3 a day — which meant spaghetti with butter and water with salt and pepper.

Seven years, $155 million and many difficulties later, Questia has survived the dot-com collapse and the aftermath of September 11 — just — and now has 48,000 books and more than 400,000 journal articles online.

Questia is adding books to its electronic library at the rate of 10,000 to 20,000 a year and Williams hopes that the rate will increase.

“My goal is to have one million books online within the next ten years,” says Williams, who was determined to go to college rather than join the family plumbing firm.

The young entrepreneur, still only 31, knew from the outset that his idea was going to be difficult to finance. At least $150 million would have to be invested to create the library before there was any realistic chance of earning revenue.

The breakthrough during the “spaghetti and butter” days came when the co-founders of Compaq, Rod Canyon and Jim Harris, invested in the business. After September 11, the institutions departed, but individual investors such as Canyon and Harris continue to support Questia.

Williams decided to specialise in the humanities and social sciences, mainly because the material does not date as quickly as science, technology and medicine (STM) publications and because STM is relatively more expensive. “Nietzsche is Nietzsche and the history of the Vietnam war is the history of the Vietnam war,” says Williams, who has tried to make his system as user-friendly as possible for students who pay $19.95 a month or $45 a quarter to subscribe to the service.

Subscribers can word search publications, which are grouped into topics and bibliographies, and footnotes are added automatically.

“What we are trying to do is remove the frustrating bits such as going to the library,” says Williams, whose home is full of thousands of books. “Students enjoy the writing because that’s their chance to have a voice.”

To protect publishers’ rights, subscribers can print off only one page at a time, although material they have accessed stays stored in their own electronic folder.

Publishers, such as Oxford University Press, are paid a royalty based on the number of pages subscribers access. For most of them, it is extra revenue that they otherwise would not have received.

Williams will not say how many subscribers Questia has, but says they come from 181 countries including Mongolia, Chad and Surinam. About 80 per cent are from the US and 5 per cent from the UK.

It is clear that the company faced big problems in 2002 with job cuts to eke out cash, but it is now hiring again and expanding. Williams insists that Questia has been cash-positive since last June and that there is no need for more fund-raising, despite plans to spend up to $60 million on marketing.

Marketing campaigns aimed at UK students are planned, and the company is also looking at the possibility of creating a school subscription model for the UK. More than 40 per cent of books on Questia’s database already come from British publishers.

Williams, who still holds about 15 per cent of the private company, remains evangelical about what he is doing.

“It’s a wonderful business for me,” he says. “It’s 50 per cent business and 50 per cent mission. I really believe deeply in what I am trying to do.

“I believe firmly that every kid around the world should be able to have access to a first-rate library, like we did at Harvard, and I believe that this is possible.”

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