HP launches print-on-demand book service to rival Google

HP is launching an online print-on-demand service that lets users publish paperback copies of out-of-copyright digital books in a move that will see it compete with Google.The programme, called Bookprep, offers customers around 500,000 books from the University of Michigan's library, which Google has digitised. Amazon is partnering with HP to sell and distribute the books.

"There's a fundamental shift taking place in the publishing industry. Print-on-demand is the future," says Andrew Bolwell, HP's director of new business initiatives, who sees such services as essential to improving the industry's efficiency.

The service puts HP in direct competition with Google, which recently announced a partnership with publisher On Demand Books to allow users to print and buy its scanned books. The deal provides customers with more than 2m out-of-copyright books, which is the largest collection of books available for on-demand printing.

Google could also potentially add a further 6m titles to the partnership, depending on the outcome of the US government's investigation into the Google Books settlement. This would establish Google as a market leader in on-demand publishing and make it increasingly difficult for any competitor to rival its service.

Meanwhile, HP's magazine publishing service MagCloud is set to collaborate with Wikia to allow customers to create a 'magazine' of Wikia pages and print them on-demand. "It's a neat tool and it lets people take what they're passionate about and organise our content into a print publication they or others would like to read," says Wikia CEO Gil Penchina.