HP Teams with Amazon to Sell Printed Public Domain Books

October 21, 2009 By Geoff Duncan

Hewlett Packard's new BookPrep service teams with the University of Michigan and Amazon to offering printed versions of half a million public domain books.

Think the market for electronic books is already getting weird enough? Things are getting a little stranger, thanks to a new partnership between Hewlett-Packard, Amazon.com, and the University of Michigan: HP’s new BookPrep service is offering almost half a million public domain titles available online—and in paperback printed form. The idea is to lower cost of republishing rare and hard-to-find books by leveraging HP Labs’ image processing and printing technologies combined with its cloud-computing infrastructure to make the books available on-demand—either online or in printed form, with scanned pages automatically cleaned up and brightened for improved readability.

“People around the world still value reading books in print,” said HP’s director of new business initiatives Andrew Bolwell, in a statement. “HP BookPrep technology allows publishers to extend the life cycle of their books, removes the cost and waste burdens of maintaining inventory, and uses a full spectrum of technologies to deliver convenient access to consumers.”

The service provides a way to digitize historic content and make it more widely available, plus eliminates a lot of damage and wear-and-tear that may be present in the originals. Since books are printed only on demand, publishers and content owners don’t face a lot of up-front costs to get their content into the system. HP’s imaging technology handled correcting alignment, correcting color, sharpening up text and images, and generating covers.

Interested customers will be able to purchase BookPrep titles through traditional and online booksellers, including Amazon.com.

HP originally rolled out BookPrep in collaboration with Applewood Books, which specializes in historical Americana titles. Applewood has been using BookPrep for a year to republish hundreds of titles, and will now also offer top titles from the University of Michigan collection.

HP has also announced MagCloud, a similar cloud-based service aiming at non-traditional magazine publishers, enabling them to offer their content using a print-on-demand model.

Showing 2 comments

Robert at 9:37pm 27th October 2009 in addition to my comment... I should mention that bookprep, may allow you to read the books online for free, but you can't save them to your drive... obviously the focus is on getting you to buy a printed copy.
Robert at 9:28pm 27th October 2009 Hmmm...Most of the PRINTED public domain books I have seen in stores, are usually at the same price, of books that require royalty payments to authors.I can hear the hand rubbing as each book transitions into the public domain, thereby allowing companies to make a higher profit, simply because they don't have to pay author royalties.That's something that goes against the whole idea of Project Gutenberg, the original, volunteer based, free, pollution free, public domain, ebook repository, which started in 1971.I guess it was only a matter of time before companies like Google, Amazon and others jumped on the bandwagon, once they figured out a way make profit from something that is, and should be free.While Amazon and HP may sell the printed books for lower than "normal", I figure they will be making a very very tidy profit for shareholdersprofiting from public domain media is just plain wrong.