Despite the imminent end of the print era, Hewlett Packard has announced a partnership with the University of Michigan which would make over a half million of the books in the university’s library available in print. That’s right, in print. In book form.

HP has a huge advantage over Google in an endeavor like this. The company knows how to print things.

I was at HP from 2004 to 2007 and one year I was fortunate enough to be a judge at the company’s OneVoice marketing awards. Amongst the brochures, trade show tchotchkes, and web site designs that I was asked to evaluate was a table of hardbound, commercial quality books produced with HP’s on-demand printing technology. The quality of the books was stunning, and there were dozens of entries that would fit in comfortably in any collection of fine books.

HP’s on-demand printing is behind Blurb, a web-based, print-on-demand service that asks “What will your book be?.” (For a look at the kinds of books people are publishing with this technology, check out Blurb’s book contest entries.)

Two pages from Roma, by Amberlea Williams, produced on (and available from) Blurb

As Information Week reports, HP calls its print-on-demand initiative “Print 2.0.”

I’m encouraged by this news for two reasons. First, it’s much healthier to have a competitive marketplace instead of a monopoly in which Google owns all the world’s content. Second, the deal brings something new to consumers, a way to buy books and read them that isn’t exclusively wed to an LCD.

Tags: Hewlett Packard, Google, Blurb, on-demand printing, print-on-demand, HP, Print 2.0, University of Michigan