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Amazon.com has now joined the ever increasing crowd of companies stampeding into the book digitization business. Google, of course, is most often associated with the digitization of books because of its stated goal to digitize every book ever written. But Google was neither the first not the only company to get into the digital book business. Project Gutenberg and ibibilo.org were digitizing books and making them available on the Internet quite a while before Google decided to digitize all the world's books. A number of other outfits, like Mises.org, were digitizing specialty books and, after Google jumped in, Microsoft and Yahoo announced plans to digitize books as well.

There is obviously money to be made in digitizing books but opinions differ as to how the money will be made and what business model will work best. However, the free market has a way of drawing out this information by means of competition as companies, each seeking to gain a competitive advantage, attempt to determine what consumers want and then risk their money in producing what they think consumers want, all the while hoping they made the right decision. In the end those who made the right call make money and those who didn't lose money. In the process consumers, including unique sub-sets of consumers, benefit from the ever growing variations of the product offered and the constantly falling prices of the product.

We are beginning to see some patterns emerging. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo each appear to see ad revenue as the way to make money. Digitized books, or parts of them in the case of the books under copyright that Google is digitizing, are offered to the public to view and read for free in an attempt to draw the people in and get them to click on ads. Of course, publishers of these books buy ads from Google and the others hoping that those “window shopping” on the Google, Microsoft and Yahoo sites will see something they want and buy from these publishers who are advertising next to the books. Project Gutenberg and ibiblio.org are non-profits who see their mission as education and, as non-profits, seek to offset their costs by soliciting donations. Mises.org seeks to popularize and make available books by Austrian School economists by digitizing them and making the digital copies available for free like the others. Also a non-profit, Mises.org seeks funds through donations and profits from selling paper editions of the books.

Now Amazon.com is entering the fray by digitizing old books whose copyrights have expired and which are either out of print or have only limited copies in existence. Like the others, Amazon appears to be planning to make the digital copies freely available on the web while offering hardbound paper copies for sale. For this Amazon is making use of print-on-demand technology which is ideal for books whose demand is limited as this technology can cost effectively print, using the saved digital image, one book at a time. Amazon admits that the motive behind the effort is their desire to increase their range of book offerings and book sales.

Ironically, the digitization and giving away of books is having the effect of bringing vast quantities of rare, limited and out of print books back on to the market. The electronic revolution is spawning a vast increase in the number and variety of old fashioned, hardbound paper books. And the consuming public is eagerly lining up to pay cash for paper copies of what they can read for free on the web.

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