A partnership between the University and BookSurge — a Seattle-based subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. — will introduce thousands of rare and out-of-print books to a new era of readers.

On Tuesday, University libraries revealed plans to make 400,000 out-of-copyright books in their collection available for reprint on demand through a partnership with BookSurge. The books, which the University expects to make available later this summer, will range from $10 to $45.

The reprint program will expand the University’s relationship with online seller Amazon.com, which has been offering a limited selection of books to the University for about five years. The agreement between the University and Amazon states that the program will last two years.

Dean of Libraries Paul Courant said the project would focus mainly on works published prior to 1923 because they are no longer protected under copyright law. Courant added that the project would slowly add more recent out-of-print and out-of-copyright books.

Courant said revenue sharing and book-pricing details are still being determined, but book prices will likely be based on page length.

While the reprinting and selling of out-of-print reproductions is common, Courant said the program is still unprecedented.

“Nobody else has done this on the scale that we have because nobody has digitized as many books as we have,” he said.

Courant said University libraries began digitizing their collection along with Cornell University in a 1995 project called Making of America, which specialized in preserving antebellum and Reconstruction-era texts. Since then, the University has digitized approximately 7 million volumes on its own and through large-scale digitization efforts with Google, which commenced in 2005.

He added that Google would receive a portion of the profits derived from sales of the books it has digitized from the University’s recent deal with BookSurge.

BookSurge Spokeswoman Amanda Wilson told The Associated Press on Tuesday that other universities and prestigious libraries have followed suit — including Emory University, the University of Maine and the Toronto and Cincinnati public libraries — and began similar reprint-on-demand projects with BookSurge in 2007.

"Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public," she said.

The project will significantly increase BookSurge’s inventory. Books to be reprinted include “Notes on Nursing: What it is and what it is not,” written in 1898 by Florence Nightingale, and “K.G.C. An authentic exposition of the origin, objects and secret work of the organization known as Knights of the Golden Circle.” The Knights of the Golden Circle were mentioned in the National Treasure movies, which may have prompted 35 people to buy copies of the 1862 publication.

Despite the program's potential to weaken sales of smaller booksellers, University libraries maintain that the project will have the opposite effect.

Maria Bonn, director of the University library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, wrote in a press release last week that current events could spur public interest in older texts and stimulate sales.

Courant agreed, adding that making a profit is a secondary objective of the project.

“We don’t expect best sellers, but there will be an intermittent demand for books, and being able to fulfill that demand is a good thing,” he said.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report.