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Internet Archive Launches Scan on Demand for Public Domain Books

From the announcement on the Open Library homepage:

Introducing Scan-On-Demand!

In partnership with the Internet Archive and OpenLibrary.org, the Boston Public Library is excited to announce a new program to allow users and patrons to “Scan-on-Demand”. It’s easy and free! Books are delivered to you, electronically, in 5-7 days

Quick inspection of this page shows that about 42,000 titles available for scanning. For now it seems that only one library is participating so far – Boston Public Library (BPL). This is very exciting news because until now users had no control over what content should be scanned – rather the selections were either culled by librarians or scanned en masse. With this, a scholar or a student looking for a specific book can very easily select what they want and get it online quickly. Hopefully, more and more libraries will be added – it would be very exciting to be able to get a book at Harvard or Oxford scanned, and made available digitally within a week!

The process itself is very simple – find a book from BPL, click the “scan” button and confirm. No money is exchanged but they do ask for a voluntary donation. Here are screenshots of what the process looks like:

Step 1 – Find the book that is available for scanning

Step 2 – Click the scan button and confirm

Step 3 – Your request is confirmed

Step 4 – The book information page now says “Queue” indicating the book will be scanned.

[Shameless Plug] Of course, once the book has been scanned and is entered in the Internet Archive system, you can easily get a printed copy via our service. Just copy and paste the URL on the second box in this page.

Tags: internet archive, public domain, publicdomainreprints —

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