The life of a good book can span hundreds of years, but most of the time, a book gets a flash of attention when it is first published – if its author is lucky. Then, it fades away.

A company called Open Road Integrated Media is trying to change that by giving a second life to older books. It does that by using machine learning to make those titles more visible online and, with a new venture announced this week, by republishing books that were largely forgotten or had fallen out of print.