SIVACRACY.NET

By DAN CARNEVALE

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.

The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes -- some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them.

"We wanted to get more content to Amazon customers," said Kurt Beidler, senior business-development manager for Amazon. And the company wanted to keep librarians' concerns in mind as well, he said. "We have a platform that puts the library in control."

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 far two university libraries -- at Emory University and the University of Maine at Orono -- have signed on to the deal. The Toronto Public Library and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County are also participating.

Martin Halbert, director for digital programs and systems at Emory's Robert W. Woodruff Library, said Amazon's approach was more appealing than Google's because the Amazon project lets the libraries control what books get digitized and what happens to the digital copies of the books. Although Google has agreed to limit its digitizing at some of the libraries it works with, the company has said repeatedly that its goal is to digitize as many books as possible.

Mr. Halbert said Emory found the Amazon program attractive "for preservation purposes as well as access purposes." He added: "We're not looking at this as a way to make money." Emory has about 200,000 books that it can digitize, some of them from the 1500s.

Lotfi Belkhir, chief executive and founder of Kirtas, said his equipment can scan and digitize 2,400 pages of text automatically in an hour. With little help from humans, he said, the machine even turns the pages -- carefully, so as not to damage old books. "It can handle the most fragile books really well," he said.

The digitized copies are of high enough quality, he said, that they can be made into e-books, microfilm, or hard copies. "It's a quality that stands the test of time, that can meet the needs of current as well as future generations," Mr. Belkhir said.