Tuesday – University of Michigan is going to team up with Amazon.com Inc. to offer reprints from its library 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. Amazon’s BookSurege unit will print the books in soft cover editions with prices ranging from $10 to $45.

According to the University of Michigan, the books are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu. There is even a book from 1898 book from Florence Michigan on nursing, “Notes on Nursing: What it is and What it is not.”

This is made possible because the university is going to digitize tis collection in partnership with Google Inc. according to Rick Fitzgerald. He said that it is basically an outgrowth of the digitization process. He further said that some of the books scanned by Mountain View are offered for sale. Mountain View is California-based Google. Other reprints being sold were scanned by the University.

The Michigan-Google partnership dates back to 2004 as part of a program that includes Harvard and Stanford as well as the University of California system. A federal court lawsuit was filed by the authors and publishers against Google for copyright laws. This was settled last year.

Books in the Google-Amazon deal do not have copyrights so there will be no royalty payments to the author or publisher. This is going to be a big addition to the inventory of BookSurge.

According to BookSurge spokeswoman Amanda Wilson in an e-mail, “Many publishers and university libraries work with BookSurge … to make content available on-demand.”

Wilson did not provide the number of titles on the their list or the number or libraries that are joining. But the 2007 launch of print-on-demand began with books from the collections of Emory University, the University of Maine and the Toronto and Cincinnati public libraries. Cornell University recently joined as well, according to Wilson.

“Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public,” Wilson stated.

This arrangement will mean that “books unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time,” in a statement by University of Michigan libraries Dean Paul Courant.

The revenues will be shared by both the university and BookSurge. The university will set the prices of each book. However, they did not disclose their financial agreement.

Find an Ann Arbor University in the Directory of Ann Arbor, MI.