Readers and researchers looking for hard-to-find books now have the opportunity to dip into the collections of one of the world's most comprehensive libraries to purchase digitized copies of public domain titles. Through their Digitize-on-Demand program, Kirtas Technologies has partnered with The New York Public Library to make 500,000 public domain works from the Library's collections available (to anyone in the world).
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Using existing information from NYPL's catalog records, Kirtas will make the library's public domain books available for sale through its retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on http://www.kirtasbooks.com and place an order for that book. When the order is placed, only then is it pulled from the shelf, digitized and made available as a high-quality reprint or digital file.
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What makes this approach to digitization unique is that NYPL incurs no up-front printing, production or storage costs. It also provides the library with a self-funding, commercial model helping it to sustain its digitization programs in the future. Unlike other free or low-cost digitization programs, the library retains the rights and ownership to their own digitized content.
Whether patrons are looking for a title about a president--such as, "Memories of President Lincoln," by Walt Whitman--or by a president--"African Game Trails; An account of the African wanderings of an American hunter-naturalist," by Theodore Roosevelt--The New York Public Library is the place to turn. Collections available on http://www.kirtasbooks.com are from NYPL's General Research Division and include books from the local and U.S. history, genealogy, humanities and social sciences collections. Titles include several 19th century cookbooks, a first print edition of "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer, "The Origin of the Werewolf Superstition" (1909) by Caroline Taylor, and first edition version of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" from 1851.
Books cost $1.95 to digitize/publish.
Here's a direct link to various collections (by source) Kirtas offers. The University of Pennsylvania, McGill University, Rochester Institute of Technology, McMaster University also work with Kirtas. According to the web site, nearly one million titles are available in the Kirtas database.
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