Belated notice of a Book Expo announcement (I missed it, too) from Michael Cairns on Personanondata: Kirtas, “the leader in high-quality, nondestructive book digitization†announced a partnership with Emory University, University of Maine, Toronto Public Library, and Cincinnati Public Library, to digitize and preserve the rare and fragile books from their collections and sell them on Amazon.com via BookSurge, the Amazon-owned print-on-demand service.
To be eligible for this program, the books must be in the public domain, or, according to the Kirtas press release, the participating universities must “own the rights†(I’m not sure what that means). Kirtas will help to fund the digitization project by offering discounts to “select†participants.
This is a very interesting idea.
Utilizing Kirtas’ robotic technology to gently scan rare books is a win for preservation — being able to sell them on Amazon.com and print them as needed, provides them with an economical way to extend the reach of their collections and enables them to take advantage of a potential new revenue source.
Unlike Google, which restricts what can be done with scanned collections by participating libraries, Kirtas leaves their partners in “full control.†They also leave the books in one piece.
One really has to wonder how many books have been inadvertently destroyed by Google in the course of scanning . . . .
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