Amazon to offer rare books via BookSurge

CHARLESTON, S.C. and ROCHESTER, N.Y. Amazon's print-on-demand service, BookSurge, and Kirtas Technologies, a book digitization company, announced today that they are collaborating with universities and public libraries to distribute their rare and inaccesible books through BookSurge. According to the companies, BookSurge and Kirtas will provide funding for the effort, and the libraries and universities will have complete control over what is scanned in their collections. The digitized books will be available on Amazon.com and other retail outlets.

"There are thousands of books that have been unavailable altogether or incredibly difficult to find and access, so we're thrilled to be making reproductions of these unique, collectible books available to millions of Amazon.com customers," said David Symonds, general manager of BookSurge. "And, by offering these works on Amazon.com and through other retail channels, it gives new generations an easy way to find books they never would have even known about, much less had access to. It's a winning solution for libraries, research institutions and customers."