Questia

Questia

Questia logo
Full page screenshot
Type of site	Online digital library
Available in	English
Founded	1998
Headquarters	United States
Owner	Gale
Slogan(s)	Trusted online research
Website	www.questia.com
Commercial	Yes
Current status	Active

Questia is an online commercial digital library of books and articles that has an academic orientation, with a particular emphasis on books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences. The great majority of items are under copyright, for which Questia has paid a fee to the copyright owners. All the text in all the Questia books and articles is available to subscribers; the site also includes integrated research tools.

Questia, based in Chicago, Illinois, was founded in 1998 and purchased by Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in January 2010.

Questia offers some information free of charge, including several public domain works, publication information, tables of contents, the first page of every chapter, Boolean searches of the contents of the library, and short bibliographies of available books and articles on some 6500 topics.

Questia does not sell ownership to books or ebooks, but rather sells monthly or annual subscriptions that allow temporary online reading access to all 78,000+ books, and 9,000,000+ journal, magazine, and newspaper articles in their collection. The books have been selected by academic librarians as credible, authoritative works in their respective areas. The librarians have also compiled about 7000 reference bibliographies on frequently researched topics. The library is strongest in books and journal articles in the social sciences and humanities, with many older historical texts. Original pagination has been maintained. The Questia service also features tools to automatically create citations and bibliographies, helping writers to properly cite the materials.

A limitation to the Questia library is that new additions are available in a "beta" version only. Unlike Questia's earlier publications, these prevent users from copying text directly from the website, although one page from the publications can be printed free of charge. A charge is made for printing a range of pages.

Questia launched their Q&A blog on September 21, 2011. Q&A is divided into "Education news," "Student resources" and "Subjects" categories. "Subjects" is further broken down so readers can find specific content based on their academic needs.