Michigan Deal A New Twist on Access to Scanned Book Content
The effort marks another repurposing of digital editions scanned in-house and by Google
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 07/23/2009
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- Reprints of 400,000 public domain works to be available on Amazon
- Reuse of UM's existing scans and those from Google scanning agreement
- Print lives on with print-on-demand
As reported by Publishers Weekly (PW) and others, the University of Michigan (UM) has partnered with Amazon subsidiary BookSurge on a reprint agreement that will make more than 400,000 titles available through print on demand (POD).
The agreement covers only materials in the public domain, and is described by the university as a means of giving rare and one-of-a-kind materials renewed life in print.
The digital scans that will be available for POD come from UM's partnership with Google in the Book Search Project, as well as from materials scanned in-house by the university. According to Michigan reps, reprints will be available in the Amazon catalog this fall, as well as through the UM Library web site.
Scan first doctrine
According to PW, “a number of libraries have scanning programs, using BookSurge for selling reprints of public domain books, including Cornell University and Emory University and public libraries in Cincinnati and Toronto, but given Michigan’s role as perhaps the most aggressive proponent of digitization, this effort is by far the largest.”
The new twist here is the potential to monetize materials that have already been scanned. This differs from the recent Cornell partnership with Kirtas Technologies, which similarly provides for reprints of public domain works but scans library materials only after a paid request is submitted.
Reuse, recycle, reprint
The effort also marks yet another repurposing of the digital content made available to UM according to the terms of its scanning agreement with Google. While UM dean of libraries Paul Courant called the POD deal an opportunity “to increase access to the rich collections of the university library," UM has participated in a number of other access-increasing endeavors, perhaps most notably as a founding and primary supporter of the HathiTrust repository.
Indeed, the same scans that will be used for reprints via this agreement with BookSurge are already freely accessible as digital editions in a number of places, including Michigan’s Mirlyn catalog and Google Book Search, in addition to the the HathiTrust catalog.
Pointing out these other points of access, LJ Digital Libraries blogger Roy Tennant took the UM/BookSurge deal as evidence against the demise of print publishing:
"Print is SO not dead. You can't even kill it off with freely available digital copies. Heck, those freely available digital copies are even adding to the number of print books you can buy. And buying them we clearly are."
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