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Digital books reborn

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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

The Associated Press

Published: October 26, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Some of technology's best-known companies are betting there's pent-up demand for on-demand books.

Hewlett-Packard Co., the world's top seller of personal computers and printers, is teaming with Amazon.com to join Internet search leader Google as the latest entrants in the quirky new market of re-creating digital books as paperbacks.

The concept represents a different type of book recycling, as digital copies created from print get a second life as paperbacks.

Publishing a single copy of a digital book usually can be done in a few minutes, allowing consumers to order a paperback version of a title that's out-of-print or only available in one or two libraries in the world.

Under the program announced Wednesday, HP is providing technology to clean up the digital copies of about 500,000 books in the University of Michigan's library before they are republished as paperbacks. The books are all considered part of the public domain, no longer protected under copyright. The paperback copies can be ordered through Amazon.com and a few other retailers.

Most of the digital copies in the University of Michigan's collection were scanned by Google.
Google embraced the concept of on-demand book publishing in a partnership launched last month. The deal allows a small company called On Demand Books to sell paperback versions of about 2 million digital books that Google has scanned into its index during the past five years.

As in HP's case, all of the Google books available for on-demand publishing aren't under copyright.

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