Ahead of next week’s annual shareholder meeting, Amazon disclosed a print-on-demand program it will run with its BookSurge subsidiary.

While Google focuses on scanning out of print books into its vast databases to make them available to people who would never see them otherwise, Amazon now has a program to print titles on demand that could benefit from renewed interest in an out of print title.

Ideally, the program announced by Amazon will be a cost-saving boon to publishers. Without significant interest in a title, publishers can’t print all the books someone may want at some point in the future.

The print on demand program provides an option for publishers to offer new titles that would not appeal beyond a lower volume of purchaser demand. Amazon claims its technology would be an economical way to print a single copy of a book upon customer request.

To encourage publisher participation, BookSurge will provide discounted book scanning services with no upfront investment to the publisher and free setup for titles with POD-ready digital files. Publishers may opt for Amazon’s Search Inside the Book and Amazon Upgrade programs at no additional cost for those titles.

Google and its competitors at Yahoo and Microsoft all have plans aimed at scanning books to create an enduring archive of published works. Amazon’s program could be the next step that would take those works from the archive with an order and get them into a reader’s possession.

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David Utter is a staff writer for webproworld covering technology and business.