A small project that I have been working on for a while is now public. It is intended to reprint public domain books from the Internet Archive via on demand printing technology. Here is how it works:
1. You request any public domain book from the Internet Archive.
2. The book is processed and submitted to Lulu, a no upfront fee print on demand company.
3. You can order the printed book from Lulu at cost (almost, a small under $1 fee
is surcharged to cover cost of conversion servers rented from Amazon EC2).
The project is called "Public Domain Books Reprints Service" and can be found here:
http://www.judaicaondemand.com/ia-reprints/
(It is being hosted by one of my on demand printing businesses)
Comments are welcome at code /at/ shaftek [dot] org or ia-reprints /at/ judaicaondemand [dot] com.
UPDATE (07/03/2008):
I am happy to announce that the infamous illustration problem in PublicDomainReprints.org has been fixed. Since the inception, our file conversion had issued with certain Internet Archive titles that had illustrations. That has been fixed as follows:
1. If a book has less than 6 illustrations, it will process in pure BW mode.
2. For books with more than 50% of pages illustrated, the entire book will be processed using grayscale mode which preserves the color of the background of the page as well.
3. Books in between (mixed) will be processed on page by page basis.
Let us know what you think.