Detroit, July 22: 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.
—-Agencies