CURRENT NEWS - October 2009

New York Public Library and Kirtas Technologies partner to make over 500,000 public-domain books available to the world

With NYPL’s extensive research collections; our mission to inspire life-long learning, advance knowledge and strengthen our communities; and to increases our opportunities to serve the public, both locally and through virtual means, NYPL is making thousands of books available to the global community. Books are available for sale through Kirtas’ retail site before they are ever digitized. Customers can search for a desired title on kirtasbooks and Google, allowing for patron driven digitization. NYPL will also digitize collections that Google was not able to scan when not working on public orders.

The formats that will become available will include paper (print on demand), raw text, TIFF and PDF. Kirtas has a relationship with Sony and the eBook file format is EPUB. Eventually, these items will migrate to online book sellers like Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.

“The New York Public Library is an iconic institution that represents strength, history and knowledge,” said Kirtas Founder and CEO Lotfi Belkhir. “We’re honored to be partnering with them to help make their collections available to the world.” Kirtas currently has 13 partnerships with universities and public libraries to make special collections available for sale online.

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