University sells digital titles on Booksurge

From Emma Jackson at University World News:

The University of Michigan’s library has partnered with Booksurge, a print-on-demand service owned by Internet retailer Amazon, to make thousands of rare and out-of-print books available for one-off printing through digitisation.

Customers will be able to browse more than 400,000 titles on Amazon.com where the digital files can be printed on demand by Booksurge and shipped to the buyer in as little as two days.

All of the titles are public domain and were scanned into digital files through the university’s internal scanning programme and a partnership with search engine Google over the last five years.

According to Maria Bonn, director of scholarly publishing at the library, more than 3 million titles have been scanned. More…