Library as Bookstore: Kirtas, Penn Team Up To Scan, Sell Public Domain Books
Josh Hadro & Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 02/25/2009
- Project will scan up to 200,000 books
- Win-win for partners
- Latest in library-as-bookstore ventures
| Go back to the Academic Newswire for more stories |
(This article first appeared in the February 24 issue of the LJ Academic Newswire.)
The University of Pennsylvania (UP) libraries announced that it is teaming up with Kirtas Technologies, a scanning and digitization company, to try something a little bit different: selling a product that doesn’t (yet) exist. Under the new partnership, users will be able to order custom print-on-demand (PoD) editions of the more than 200,000 texts among the Penn library’s public domain holdings. The twist: nothing will get scanned until an order is placed. Unlike Google’s large-scale Book Search scanning project, this digitization effort will be driven entirely by end-users.
“That frees us from difficult selection decisions and lets the digital collection grow in response to user demand,” said Carton Rogers, vice provost and director of libraries at UP. Moreover, while the quality of the Book Search scans is optimized for optical character recognition (OCR) used in Google’s indexing efforts, Penn officials said Kirtas’s scanning process results in a higher quality scan, suitable for print-on-demand. The partnership is being pitched as a win-win: Kirtas gains digital content for sale on its retail site, and the Penn library’s digital collection will grow in direct response to user demand, while covering the up-front costs of scanning the texts. In recent years, book scanning has become increasingly efficient. Kirtas' says its latest machine can scan books for just pennies per page, and can scan up to 2400 pages an hour.
Academic library as bookstore
The Penn/Kirtas partnership is the latest in an ever-expanding range of library-as-bookstore operations. In June of 2007, Emory University initiated a similar program, purchasing a Kirtas book scanner, with plans to upload titles, initially selected by librarians, to a library web site where scholars can access them and, if they wish, buy PoD editions through Amazon.com. In return, Emory will receive compensation from the sales, 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.”
Last week, meanwhile, Cornell University, through its ongoing partnership with Amazon.com, said it would increase its PoD offerings to more than 80,000 titles, and that by the end of 2009, tens of thousands of new books would be added to the approximately 6000 items already available in Cornell’s Amazon collection. The Cornell University Library has been a pioneer with PoD services. It’s partnership with Amazon began in 2006, and the library is currently engaged in a large-scale digitization initiative with Google that will create 500,000 digitized books over the next six years.
Last fall, the University of Michigan (UM) Library became the first academic library to install an Espresso Book Machine (EBM), from On Demand Books. The machine can produce a quality paperback book on demand, in about five minutes, for roughly $10 per book. The EBM is located in the lobby of UM’s Shapiro Library, and offers reprints of any public domain titles from the library’s digitized collection of nearly two million books, as well as thousands of books available from the Open Content Alliance.
The next phase
With the recent PoD efforts, libraries are revealing the next phase of the digital revolution—a phase where public domain titles on our nation’s library shelves begin to find their way back into print, via on-demand, customizable books. “Some of the time, an electronic book that can be accessed any time, anywhere, and quickly searched is exactly what we need,” Maria Bonn, director of UM Libraries Scholarly Publishing Office told the LJ Academic Newswire. “At other times, the ideal form of the book is a nicely bound copy.”
UM librarian Paul Courant, meanwhile added that creating on-demand print books helps libraries realize the full power of digitization. “Digital and print versions work in tandem,” Courant noted, “and soon researchers anywhere in the world will be able to browse UM’s digitized holdings, select a book from our out of copyright collections, and have the book printed within minutes.”
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