Old books get a new life, a local company that digitizes out-of-print materials

A company in downtown Charleston is changing the way culture in our society will be preserved. Digitization used to be an expensive process, only accessible to libraries and universities who could afford to cover the cost; it is an important process for depositories who hold valuable information that is irreplaceable. BiblioLife has given libraries, universities, special collections, archives, museums and nonprofits access to share their content with the world in a way that is financially sustainable and makes the information available for purchase.

BiblioLife creates a business partnership with libraries and other institutions of rare and valuable information; they provide their partner with scanning machines to digitize their content. Each page is turned and scanned. Software created by BiblioLife takes the scanned image and makes it into a clean, readable format. The final part of the process is manually looked at by a reader to check for mistakes and to make corrections. The library or archive gets a searchable, reader-friendly version of the book as well as a platform to share it with patrons, students and employees.

The information is then made available to the world through the thousands of BiblioLife’s retail partners. When the book is purchased online, a print-on-demand manufacturer creates the book and sends the original content to the customer in hard cover, trade paperback or large print. The library or archive that provided the content receives a percentage of each sale,every time the content is purchased. This provides libraries and other carriers of valuable information the potential to create a self-sustaining revenue stream while contributing to the wealth of knowledge available to the world.

Bob Holt, BiblioLife chief executive, founded the company in January 2006 after Amazon bought BookSurge , a local publishing company that he and Mitchell Davis co-founded.

“I always loved the idea of preserving cultures and … cultures are best expressed in their visual and written arts. The visual art portion has gotten a lot of attention and preservation throughout history. Part of the digital revolution gives libraries the opportunity to move toward digital delivery of books in their effort to disseminate knowledge and preserve culture,” Holt said.

Holt said he has created a team of individuals who are hard working, creative and passionate about making digitization easy, accessible and profitable. BiblioLife has eight employees, six of which worked for Holt and Davis at BookSurge. The office is in a restored historic house on Cannon Street and the company is a registered renewal community.

It’s all in the numbers
BiblioLife has estimated that there are between 60 million and 90 million out-of-print, out-of-copyright books in the world. Davis spoke about how a variance of 30 million books is very telling in that no one really knows how many books are out there. Bibliolife has digitized 60,000 unique books that are currently available for purchase. There are another 200,000 files in their database going through the process of digitization. And their database continues to grow each day.

In December 2008, BiblioLife signed a partnership with the Bibliographical Center for Research, a nonprofit organization committed to making libraries more successful. BCR is the country’s oldest, multi state library cooperative and they have committed to digitizing 600,000 books by 2013 with BiblioLife, Ingram Digital and the Shelf2Life program.

The content that was once only accessible in those specific libraries will now be available to anyone with the click of a button.

The importance of libraries
Public libraries are the physical and cultural centers that exist in almost every community. They hold decades and centuries of information. BiblioLife has the vision to obtain rare and unique books from the public domain that are currently kept in places such as special collections, where access is limited and most books are not permitted to leave the room. Digitization will give users access to the most valuable resource in our society: knowledge. With libraries and other depositories utilizing BiblioLife’s equipment and software, books out of print will come back to life; authors that have been forgotten will be remembered.

“There is a passion for helping people connect with information. It makes all the sense in the world to preserve that content for the future and all the institutions that hold those books serve an important role in our culture as being preservers of those works that can’t be recreated,” Davis said. Davis also talked about library use increasing during stressful economic times and how increased use doesn’t translate to an increase in funding. Libraries largely depend on public funding for their operations; they can now use their content to generate revenue and become more self-sufficient.

Making the old new again
BibilioLife currently focuses on digitizing material that was produced before Jan. 1, 1923. The next phase of their operation will be to digitize scrolls, manuscripts, maps and photographs and eventually digitize books that were published after 1923. The company intends to create platforms where people can interact with each other about books, build a book social network and a knowledge enhancement data base. Holt said BiblioLife is committed to expanding their digitization efforts to other countries in order to preserve the many diverse cultures that make up the global community.

Holt said, “Our goals are the preservation of human knowledge and the accessibility to that by anyone in the world. I want for people to have access to the collective intelligence of humanity.”