According to a recent news report (this link will be active for 5 days after this post) Amazon is now in the digital book business. Unlike Google’s massive project which added the Big 10 universities a few weeks ago to its 15 or so other libraries, Amazon is digitizing books that can be printed and sold through their book distribution business. Just like you’d buy the newest novel or some of your school textbooks and receive them in the mail a week or so later, you’ll receive a digitized printout of that book in the mail. The caveat is that they’re only going to sell books that are public domain and that a library has copyright to.
I’m not sure exactly what they mean by that a “library has copyright to.” Does it mean that if you don’t go to one of the schools or use one of the public libraries that is partaking in this digitizing project, you won’t be able to purchase a book that a library has copyright to? To me it seems that if it isn’t old enough to have had the copyright lapsed, there isn’t any book that could be sold through this print-on-demand sort of process. Additionally, as I have pointed out in my posts on google books and sites like Gutenberg and LibriVox, there are other outlets in which you can get books whose copyright has passed. So, why would anyone want to pay for a print copy of something that could be free. To be fair, I know I paid for many books whose copyright had lapsed (see any of the ancient Greek & Roman texts). But, unless it is cheaper than buying one of those from the bookstore and it is the exact same translation as your professor wants for your class, it doesn’t seem to make sense.
From the point of view of some librarians the relationship between amazon and the library as well as the digitizing company is beneficial.
“Amazon is working with a company called Kirtas Technologies, which sells book-digitizing equipment. Libraries participating in the project will buy the equipment and decide which books they want to scan. Amazon can then use the digital files to sell hard copies of the books, sharing the profits with the libraries and Kirtas.”
So, libraries will also in turn profit from this rather than a blanket digitization of the books by Google and Microsoft not receiving any money (that I know of). There are only two universities (Emory University & University of Maine at Orono) and two public libraries (Toronto Public Library and Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) so it’s definitely not as massive as the others. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what becomes of this but it is an interesting development and one that libraries and librarians must take note of.
