Amazon.com is following Google’s example and embarking on a project to digitize books in university libraries. I think there are a few features of their attempt which, if they follow through, could make their efforts more useful to historians and scholars.

The Chronicle of Higher Education explains:

But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.

And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.

Amazon is clearly not taking the “conquer the world” approach that Google has and is not attempting to scan and catalogue every book in existence. This seems like a safe way to go, and it is, perhaps, an indication of the difference in corporate cultures between the two companies.

What really impresses me is the idea that they will make it very easy to purchse copies of rare or out of print books using on-demand printing technology. This is going to be absolutely amazing for scholars who locate a book in some other library and do not want to go through the Interlibrary Loan process and/or need their own copy for extensive research. Hopefully Google will find some way to follow suit.

The complete story from The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Amazon Will Digitize Universities’ Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies”