Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.
Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company.
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.
Read the article in it’s entirety at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/06/2007062206n.htm
Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/22/07
