SAN FRANCISCO -- Some of the technology industry's best-known companies are betting there's pent-up demand for on-demand books. Hewlett-Packard is teaming up with Amazon.com to challenge Google in the quirky new market of re-creating digital books as paperbacks. HP and Amazon announced their alliance Wednesday, a few weeks after Google formed a similar partnership with a company called On Demand Books. The concept represents a different type of book recycling, as digital copies created from print get a second life as paperbacks. The HP program offers to publish paperback versions of about 500,000 digital books scanned from the University of Michigan's library. The paperback copies can be ordered through Amazon.com and a few other retailers.
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