*I get a daily email of news from SiliconValley.com and though this might be of interest to genealogists: * *New HP service undigitizes books: * * *HP believes this whole print-to-digital book conversion push is very much a two-way street — sometimes, for some things, you really want a hard copy. And for a company with roots in printing and ambitions in services, the next play was a natural: How about we offer custom book printing services? And so we see making its formal debut from HP Labs an initiative that puts powerful publishing abilities into the hands of the masses. The service is called BookPrep, and it enables any publisher "to digitize any existing book and turn it into a virtual asset that can be sold over the Internet and printed on demand — either as is, or personalized by the consumer. ... BookPrep automatically aligns and flattens scanned texts of current and out-of-print-books, cleans and brightens the fold and corners of the pages for consistent coloration, and outputs a professional and print-ready PDF eMaster. ... BookPrep makes it possible to give consumers access to every book ever published as a high quality replica of the original that they can even personalize." The appeal here is in the long tail, all the fodder for those with passionate niche interests residing in the estimated 90 million books that are out of print, millions of them out of copyright. The latest addition to the books available for on-demand printing is a collection of 500,000 rare or out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan Library. And while the cost of a custom run was once prohibitive, new technology will let HP price a 250-page book around $15. To read more about this new "BookPrep" service, and search for books already available, go here: http://www.bookprep.com/ Their description states: "Bookprep makes historical books available for you to read online or own in printed form. Using imaging and printing technology from HP Labs, our systems automatically clean and brighten scanned pages." Sandy (Whalen) Bauer