John Musser, February 14th, 2008 Comments(1)

One of the more unusual mashups add to our listings lately is our entry for Public Domain Reprints, a non-profit service that lets you take public domain books on sites like Google Books and the Internet Archive and print them on Lulu.com. The service combines APIs from a few of these services like the LuLu API and the Internet Archive API as well as the EC2 API for hosting. It’s a fairly straightforward but useful service. As creator Yakov Shafranovich describes on his blog:

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).

There are a lot of titles to choose from with over 200,000 public domain books on the Internet Archive and 1.5 million on Google Books. For more, their FAQ goes into some details and Philipp Lenssen recently did an interview with Yakov over at Google Blogoscoped.