Gates Company Buys Photo Collection Used In Textbook Publishing

By Peter West

Textbook publishers were cautiously optimistic last week that the sale of one of their prime sources of archival photographs would have a minimal impact on their industry.

The Corbis Corp., a company owned by William H. Gates III, the co-founder and president of the Microsoft Corp., this month bought the Bettmann Archive, a collection of more than 16 million photographs, drawings, and other works, for an undisclosed sum. The company already owned nearly a half-million images, which it licenses to publications.

The purchase was viewed by some as an early sign of a trend in which electronic publishers will increasingly acquire the rights to collections that traditionally have been available only in a printed form, with the objective of obtaining the raw material to create new educational and "edutainment" software. (See page 14 of special...