In 2008, the Cornell Library collaborated with Microsoft to create approximately 80,000 digital books from titles in our collection. These digital books are now all in the public domain. In addition to storing them locally for archival purposes, we shared them with the Internet Archive for inclusion in their “American Libraries” collection of digital books. This collection includes thirty books from the Hotel School Library. The transfer was made using the “rsync protocol” over the National LambdaRail (similar to the very fast Internet2 network), a method that allowed a pool of two hundred of Internet Archive’s servers to rapidly pull files from CUL’s archival storage. The digital books are accessible with no restrictions at: http://www.archive.org/details/cornell The Internet Archive is now offering Kindle versions of the books in this collection for un-restricted download.
Print-On-Demand
The Cornell Library currently list 57,000 titles for sale via print-on-demand (POD) from Amazon. To date, Amazon has sold 6,000 copies from this collection, averaging 1,200 books/month. The top 5 selling titles in 2010:
• A Colored man’s reminiscences of James Madison – 78
• Quail breeding manual – 34
• On Religion: Speeches to its Cultural Despisers – 32
• Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt – 20
• Fiat Money Inflation in France (note: Andrew Dickson White is author) – 20
This summer the Library will submit approximately 500 Wordsworth collection titles suitable for POD.
Cornell Library Digital Books on the Internet Archive
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