Amazon offers rare books

2009-07-22 12:00

Detroit - The University of Michigan said on Tuesday it is teaming up with Amazon.com Inc to offer reprints of 400 000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books from its library. Seattle-based Amazon's BookSurge unit will print the books on demand in soft cover editions at prices from $10 to $45.

The Ann Arbor school said the books are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include an 1898 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale, Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is not.

The move is possible because of the university's project to digitise its collection in partnership with Google Inc, school spokesperson Rick Fitzgerald said.

"It's basically an outgrowth of the digitisation process," Fitzgerald said. He said some of the reprints being offered for sale are of books scanned by Mountain View, California-based Google, while others were processed by the university itself.

The Michigan-Google partnership started in 2004 as part of a programme that also includes Harvard and Stanford universities and the University of California system. Authors and publishers filed a federal court lawsuit claiming the pact violated copyright laws, but Google and the publishing industry settled the suit last year.

No copyright protection

The books in the Michigan-Amazon deal do not have copyright protection and are in the public domain, so no royalty payments go to the author or original publisher.

The arrangement is a large addition to BookSurge's inventory.

"Many publishers and university libraries work with BookSurge... to make content available on-demand," BookSurge spokesperson Amanda Wilson said in an e-mail.

Wilson declined to provide figures on the number of titles on BookSurge's list or the number of participating libraries. But the print-on-demand service's 2007 launch began with books from the collections of Emory University, the University of Maine and the Toronto and Cincinnati public libraries. Cornell University recently joined as well, she said.

"Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public," Wilson said.

University of Michigan libraries Dean Paul Courant said the arrangement means "books unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time".

The university sets the prices of each book and shares the revenue with BookSurge. The school didn't disclose details of the financial arrangement.

- AP