Friday, July 31, 2009

Technology enables rare books

Fed up with not being able to get hold of that out-of-print book?

A new partnership shows a model for future access to rare (or small-run) publications - using three different aspects of technology.

The University of Michigan is running a project to digitise its collection. It has partnered with Amazon to offer access to their collection of 400,000 rare, out-of-print books. Amazon had already bought a print-on-demand company called BookSurge; Amazon itself acts as an aggregation point for millions of titles, and its high profile will best enable sharing of the University's collection.

The way of the future: an aggregation point plus a demand publish service, plus the archival content. Cool.

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