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Amazon buys on-demand book printer

CNET News.com Staff | April 4, 2005 4:19 PM PDT

Summary

Online retail giant snaps up privately held BookSurge, which specializes mainly in out-of-print titles.

Topics

CNET News.com Staff, Web Technology
Online retailing giant Amazon.com has stepped into on-demand book printing, acquiring privately held BookSurge, a South Carolina-based company that specializes mainly in out-of-print titles. Amazon did not release financial details of the acquisition.

BookSurge keeps a catalog of thousands of titles, mostly out-of-print or in low demand, including several foreign-language books, and lets consumers print them out. Some major titles that BookSurge maintains include the Arabic-language version of international bestseller "The Da Vinci Code," titles by New York Times bestselling author Robert Morgan, and Pura Belpre's "Perez and Martina: A Puerto Rican Folktale." The titles are now available for sale on Amazon.com. "Print-on-demand has changed the economics of small-quantity printing, making it possible for books with low and uncertain demand to be profitably produced," Greg Greeley, Amazon's vice president for media products, said in a statement.

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