In a new partnership, the University of Michigan will team up with Amazon.com, Inc.'s BookSurge to sell thousands of books out-of-copyright books, making a number of rare and one-of-a-kind titles available to a new generation of readers.

BookSurge will sell books scanned during the university's partnership with Google and titles scanned by the university. The program will initially offer 400,000 titles, with a multilingual range from Acoli to Zulu. According to the release, prices will vary, but will be "as little as a few dollars." When a reader makes a purchase, Amazon BookSurge will print and bind a softcover edition of the book.

U-M libraries dean Paul N. Courant had this statement: "The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitized ... We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library."