HP bets on paper books and magazines in digital age; San Jose Business Journal, 10/21/09

San Jose Business Journal; HP bets on paper books and magazines in digital age:

"Hewlett-Packard Co. is placing a big bet on paper magazines and paper books, even as electronic books and readers become more popular, with Barnes & Noble introducing its new Nook reader Tuesday.

HP is setting up projects to allow people to print their own magazines and to print old books that are out of copyright.

Palo Alto-based HP (NYSE: HPQ) is working with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, who started Wikipedia, on Mag Cloud, a service that lets people pay about 20 cents a page to create and print magazines from Wales’ for-profit Wikia business. Someone can put together content from various Wikia pages and print them out as a magazine.

People can print books if the copyright has expired using another HP service called BookPrep. To print a 250-page book will cost about $15, for example."

http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2009/10/19/daily53.html

'U' teams with Amazon to make 400,000 rare books available; Michigan Daily, 7/21/09

AP via Michigan Daily; 'U' teams with Amazon to make 400,000 rare books available:

"The University of Michigan said Tuesday it is teaming up with Amazon.com Inc. to offer reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books from its library. Seattle-based Amazon's BookSurge unit will print the books on demand in soft cover editions at prices from $10 to $45...

The books in the Michigan-Amazon deal do not have copyright protection and are in the public domain, so no royalty payments go to the author or original publisher...

"Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public," [BookSurge spokeswoman Amanda] Wilson said.

University of Michigan libraries Dean Paul Courant said the arrangement means "books unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time.""

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/2009-07-20/u-teams-amazon-make-400000-rare-books-available

Company's 'ATM For Books' Prints On Demand; Podcast [4 min. 13 sec.] NPR's All Things Considered, 5/28/09

Podcast [4 min. 13 sec.]: Rob Gifford via NPR's All Things Considered; Company's 'ATM For Books' Prints On Demand:

"The company that makes the Espresso calls it "an ATM for books." On Demand Books CEO Dane Neller says it's the biggest revolution in publishing since Gutenberg started printing more than 500 years ago. He says it will help keep paper books way ahead of electronic books, such as those available on the Amazon Kindle.

"Our technology now makes it possible for the printed page to move as rapidly as the electronic page," he says. "The printed book still remains overwhelmingly the dominant way books are read. I mean, I think the last statistic I saw worldwide, the electronic book is still less than a half percent."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104644575