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Amazon.com is partnering with the University of Michigan to reprint 400,000 titles that are no longer under copyright protection or are out of print.

Amazon's BookSurge unit will print and bind the books in soft cover and they will be available on the site for $10 to $45 depending on the length.

Paul N. Courant

"This agreement means that titles that have been generally unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time," said Paul N. Courant, U-M librarian and dean of libraries.

"The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitized," Courant said.

Maria Bonn, director of the U-M Library's scholarly publishing office, said the reprint program includes both books digitized by the university and those digitized through its partnership with Google.

All of the books being sold on Amazon are titles that remain available in their original form at the library. The university has been offering a limited number of titles for reprint on demand with BookSurge and other partners for the past fives years. A popular reprint might sell around a 100 copies, Bonn said.

The university will set the list price of each book and under the agreement it will share revenue with BookSurge.