Emory Announces Plan To Scan, Sell Books from Its Library

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 6/8/2007

Officials at Emory University, Atlanta, have departed from the Google Book Search Library Project model, choosing instead to scan and sell their own books. Emory officials said they have purchased a Kirtas robotic book scanner, which can digitize as many as 50 books per day, turning each volume into a PDF file. After being scanned, the titles will be uploaded to a web site where scholars can access them and, if they wish, buy "print on demand" (POD) editions through Amazon.com and eventually "other distribution channels." In return, Emory will receive compensation from the sale of copies, though Emory director for digital programs Martin Halbert stressed that the POD feature "is not intended to generate a profit," but to help the library recoup some of its costs "in making out-of-print materials available."

Many academic libraries have scanning centers, and Emory's plan to scan and sell books through POD is certainly an ambitious path for libraries, but one that comes with its own challenges and limitations in terms of time and money. The University of Michigan (UM), for example, has an active scanning center but decided the cost and time investment was simply too much compared to what Google offered them. "I think we probably had the most aggressive digitization project of academic libraries out there," James Hilton, associate provost for academic information and instructional technology affairs at UM told Library Journal in fall 2005, "and it was still going to take us 1000 years to make it through our collection at a cost that was staggering." In signing on to Google's scan plan earlier this week, officials at the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) estimated the total cost of digitizing a book at approximately $60.

Still, the Emory plan represents a bold step forward for libraries into the scholarly publishing realm. Emory is one of a handful of academic libraries to establish a major online peer-reviewed journal, the web-based journal Southern Spaces. And Emory officials said they believe the libraries' will do much more publishing beyond making out-of-print books accessible. "The Emory libraries plan to use the program to support an array of scholarly publishing needs on our campus," said Rick Luce, vice provost for libraries. "We will be providing new opportunities for our faculty and students to disseminate their work, if they choose to do so, under the Emory banner."