The Library of Congress Revives Public Domain Works

CreateSpace, part of the Amazon.com, Inc., today announced an agreement with The Library of Congress to make at least 50,000 public books available through www.amazon.com. The Library of Congress also reached an agreement with Amazon Europe to make tens of thousands of books in the public domain available around the world to customers on www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de and www.amazon.fr using print on-demand technology, an inventory-free, cost-efficient publishing solution that only manufactures titles as customers order them.

This announcement with The Library of Congress follows the announcement in February 2010 that The British Library would be bringing at least 65,000 public domain titles to market using print on-demand. From Victorian classics to "penny dreadfuls," readers now have access to The British Library's unique collection of historic content.

As part of their ongoing efforts to improve access to material through digitization, the libraries provide CreateSpace and Amazon Europe's print on-demand business with digital copies of scanned public domain books in their collections to be manufactured on-demand. Creating digital files from physical books preserves the integrity of the original works, and the new paperback editions available through CreateSpace and Amazon Europe distribution channels increase accessibility of those works to readers.

With CreateSpace Print on-Demand, these national libraries will make a large selection of content available quickly and easily via CreateSpace's host of U.S. distribution channels, including www.amazon.com, ensuring wide public access with little economic investment. Since titles are only manufactured in response to customer demand, no inventory is needed and the titles will never go out of stock, making print on-demand an economic, convenient, and environmentally responsible public access solution for libraries.

The Library of Congress and The British Library are the most recent organizations to work with CreateSpace Print on-Demand and Amazon Europe's print on-demand business to give readers access to rare or out-of-print titles. Other noteworthy institutions--such as The University of Michigan Library--have already made tens of thousands of titles available on Amazon's U.S. and European websites using CreateSpace Print on-Demand and Amazon Europe's print on-demand business.

"Libraries are adopting print on-demand to give the public access to more works globally that may previously only have been available in a single country or even just in their individual physical catalogs," said Dana LoPiccolo-Giles, managing director, CreateSpace. "We are looking forward to helping support The Library of Congress in its public access and preservation mission through our print on-demand solution."

For more information about CreateSpace Print on-Demand, please visit www.createspace.com/info/publisher.