Kirtas gets Digitize-on-Demand boost from NYPL

It seems the more established digital texts become, the more options there are for converting those texts right back into bound paper and ink.

On September 29, Kirtas Technologies announced a partnership with the research collection at the New York Public Library (NYPL). According to the company's Deanna Vincent, the addition of 500,000 public domain works from the library brings the Kirtas offerings up to nearly one million items.

From the Kirtas Books catalog, users can purchase either a digital scan or, for additional cost, a bound reprint. The company also has come to be known for what it calls Digitize-on-Demand, whereby a scan is initiated only at the time an order is placed. According to the firm, this sets the process apart as self-funded and requires “no up-front printing, production or storage costs” from the library. In return, the library retains a digitized copy.

“I think this has gone from 'nice-to-have' to really becoming a necessity,” Vincent said of a print-on-demand (POD) outlet for scanned texts. Indeed, in just the last few months, there's been a profusion of partnerships between POD outlets and digitization services and major e-text collections.

While Kirtas has existing relationships with university libraries like Cornell, Penn, and McGill, Amazon subsidiary BookSurge signed a deal in July with the University of Michigan to make 400,000 works available on Amazon.

In September, Google and On Demand Books, developers of the Espresso Book Machine, reached an agreement to make two million public domain titles available to the Espresso POD machines that are currently moving into bookstores and university libraries around the world.