Yes, we’ve run items on print-on-demand technology and the Espresso machine. But here’s a nice overview. Thanks, Chris! – D.R.

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Who says e-reading is the only way to enjoy digitally stored text?

Publishers can now turn digital files into single copies of a professional-quality printed book without requiring a full-fledged production run on a printing press. In the most advanced form, the technology even allows printing at the exact location it is needed.

This is worlds apart from the traditional publishing method of printing centrally and shipping to stores.

Traditional Publishing vs. the Vanity Press

Affordable, consumer-friendly print-on-demand technology has been a sought-after grail of the publishing world for at least ten years.

Traditional publishing has always suffered from a problem called economy of scale. It costs so much to set up a printing operation to create a book that publishers must sell either a huge quantity of inexpensive books or a lesser quantity of expensive books in order to break even.

So publishers have had to pick and choose what books could be published, with significant incentive to publish only the most commercially successful works they possibly could.

Death of the midlist

In recent years, this has lead to the “death of the midlist.” That’s the publishing industry term for books that only sell decently. Some publishers have squeezed out midlist writers in favor of those who consistently produce bestsellers.

Of course, it was always possible to finance your own print run, through so-called “vanity presses.” However, vanity publishing had a bad reputation due to the high per-book cost of small print runs—and due to the large number of shady operators. They would prey upon the author’s gullibility and desire to see his work in print to con him out of a good deal of money to print the book.

In the end the author would be left with the realization that he would have to spend still more money to market it on his own.

So in the old days, vanity publishing was considered feasible only for inferior or so-so writers who had large sums of money burning holes in their pockets. Their vanity led them to want to see the book in print even if it wasn’t good enough for a “real” publisher.

Deciding print run size: Another problem with traditional publishing

Another problem with traditional publishing has been deciding on the right size of print runs. Printing too few books results in lost sales by consumers who lose interest when they are not able to get the book immediately. Printing too many runs up huge warehousing costs, as well as costs associated with destroying excess copies that do not sell.

Warehousing and distribution costs may actually account for considerably more expense than printing costs in the end.

Unhappy returns

Lacking effective crystal ball gazers, publishers are often stuck with lots of unsold books. Due to a clause that has been grandfathered into publishing contracts since time immemorial, publishers usually have to buy back from bookstores all copies that do not sell.

Such bought-back or otherwise unsold books are generally either destroyed or sold at a huge markdown to returned book vendors who turn around and sell them at similarly low prices. These are the books you often see in stacks on tables at Waldenbooks or other bookstores with really low price labels on them.

This was also an obstacle to the growth of book superstores such as Amazon.com. The more titles such a store was to carry, the more warehouse space it would need for books that sold very rarely but still needed to be stocked against the chance that someone eventually would order them.

Enter print-on-demand

However, by the late 1990s, digital printing had advanced enough that professional-quality books could be produced cheaply in smaller numbers, by industrial-strength laser printers. With no type to set, such a printer could produce any one of a whole library’s worth of digitally-stored books on short notice. Or, in other words, print them on demand.

It would still have to be professionally bound and then shipped out like any other book, of course, but compared to the cost of setting up a full-scale print run, the savings were substantial.

The rise of Xlibris, Lulu and Lightning Source

A number of companies were soon set up to take advantage of this industrial-scale print-on-demand technology. Smaller companies such as Xlibris and Lulu deal directly with consumers, while  larger companies like Lightning Source are integrated more directly into the larger publishing industry.

In fact, Lightning Source serves as a considerable part of Amazon.com’s merchandising back end.

Lightning’s print-on-demand capability makes it possible for Amazon to stock more book titles than it can afford to warehouse. When it receives an order for a seldom-requested book, it can simply have Lightning Source print the book out as needed.

Beyond “vanity”

Amazon was not the only one helped by industrial print-on-demand publishing. Thanks to the smaller print-on-demand companies, self-publishing has gone from strictly “vanity” to something that many small publishers or even single individuals can do economically.  For example, Diane Duane will be using Lulu to create printed versions of The Big Meow (see this TeleRead entry) for her subscribers.

Many small presses no longer contract traditional printing for their books but instead send them off to a POD outfit such as Lightning Press.

As Lightning Press offers packages that include automatic listing for sale on Amazon.com, it has become easier than ever to self-publish and promote the book at the same time—perhaps in some cases, too easy. In fact, my own uncle has a self-published print-on-demand book listed at Amazon.com.

Enter Espresso: Beyond the central printing model

But these industrial-scale print-on-demand companies still have one foot in traditional publishing; the books still must be printed by a centrally-located company and then shipped out to the customer.

For a number of years now, companies have been seeking to make something more portable—a consumer-level kiosk that can be placed in libraries and bookstores to produce fast, inexpensive individual copies of books requested by consumers. The process itself is not that difficult. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was able to put everything necessary to create inexpensive printed and bound versions of public-domain books in his Internet Bookmobile van and tour the country with it.

There is also a non-profit organization called Public Domain Reprints that prints and ships copies of public domain ebooks at cost. I have ordered a book from PDR, and will be reviewing it here when it arrives. The problem comes in automating the procedure so it can be done entirely without human intervention.

The On-Demand Espresso Book Machine

But a company called On Demand Books has done it. In 2006, they produced the first model of their Espresso book machine. Dubbed “an ATM for books” by CNN, the Espresso incorporates a computer, two printers, apparatus for bookbinding and trimming, and automation to tie them all together.

A book can go from PDF files on a computer to a finished, professional-quality paperback book in under ten minutes. The machine itself costs $140,000 (though CNN’s article claimed $50,000; perhaps $50,000 is the cost and $140,000 the retail price). It can produce books at a cost of a penny a page.

A sticky problem

But creating the book machine was not as simple as just hooking some equipment together. To create a system that could go from long periods of inactivity to instantly cranking out a book, the On Demand team needed to find a method of gluing the spine to the block (the printed pages) without hot glue. Glue kept hot for too long thickens and loses its effectiveness, and also smells bad.

In the end, they developed a new method of binding that kept the glue at room temperature until needed and then hit it with a burst of ultrasound to heat it up.

The Espresso-Lightning Print agreement

Originally, the Espresso was limited to public-domain titles only, but in April, On Demand entered into a partnership with Lightning Source, the owners of Lightning Print.

The agreement  would give On Demand access to Lightning’s scanning facilities (to create high-quality digital copies of books that they could then reproduce through the Espresso). It would also allow them to use copyrighted material from any of Lightning Source’s publishers who opt to let them.

World Bank site of first completed Espresso machine

The first completed Espresso was deployed in 2006 at the World Bank in Washington DC, amid much fanfare (see also a 33 minute RealVideo recording of the ceremony). It has since been moved to the New Orleans Public Library to replace books destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

Seven others now exist in such places as the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt; the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, California; and several bookstores or libraries in the US, Canada, and Australia.

In October, some of the machines will start appearing in British bookstores as well.

Still in early stages

While the Espresso offers a potentially bright future for paper book lovers in an e-world, it is still in its early stages.

The existing machines are on the order of prototypes. You see a bunch of off-the-shelf printing and binding equipment jumbled together in an unholy mess of assembly-line robotics that would seem more at home on a factory floor than in a library or bookstore.

They are also costly and time-consuming to build: On Demand has to spend about a month per unit putting them together from scratch. However, On Demand hopes to have a second-generation, mass-producible, prettier-looking unit ready by fall 2008, to begin leasing in 2009.

Implications for e-books and treebooks

If the Espresso is able to be mass-produced, it may not be long before it starts showing up in bookstores, libraries, airports, maybe even coffee shops all over the place—and its effects might filter over to affect e-books as well.

After all, e-book vendors already offer all their wares in digital format. Print publishers that resell their wares through Fictionwise might not want Fictionwise going into direct competition with them. But smaller publishers selling their titles e-only, because they cannot afford even limited industrial POD print runs, might just find this a match made in heaven.

Likewise, if PDF roleplaying game sourcebooks could be economically one-off printed in better-than-Kinko’s quality, it could expand their market as well.

Handy even for the big guys

And even traditional print publishers will not always have the foresight to print enough of their books. Print runs take time, and if a novel turns into an unexpected best-seller, it might be a week or more between the first print run selling out and the second hitting stores.

If the novel could be printed on demand as a stopgap, it might mean selling thousands of copies that would otherwise go unsold as would-be buyers cool down during its unavailability.

It also means that older titles need never go “out of print”—as long as the publisher has a digital copy on hand, a single new paper copy can always be printed out without the cost of setting up a print run or shipping it to the store.

(Of course, this will be a concern to some authors, whose contracts have so-many-years-out-of-print rights revision clauses. But that was an issue caused by e-books as well, and there have been several years since the problem first was noted in which to work that out.)

Consumer-level print-on-demand, as exemplified by the Espresso, is a hybrid of P and E that brings the availability advantages of an e-book to the form factor of a paper book. It it means that people who prefer not to read on a screen need not be left entirely out of the digital revolution. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this situation as it develops.

YouTube Videos

Take a look at these videos of the Espresso in action. The first one is kind of a puff piece, but the second one gets a bit more technical.

5 COMMENTS

  1. I suspect this is transitional technology. Right now I can buy a colour duplex laser printer and a thermal binding machine for less than $2500, and coming down fast. Any PDF that I can download I can turn into a p-book in about half an hour for the cost of some paper and ink. And if I need it trimmed the local printer will cut 250 sheets for $1.

    Why should I take a trip to town and stand in line at a bookstore so I can pay twice the price for the same thing with a fancy cover? Once a global system is in place that can supply PDFs to POD printers on demand, then it might as well go public and supply everybody.

    We may start with eBooks piggybacked on POD, but I believe the relationship will soon flip over. To me it sounds a lot like record stores offering to burn music CDs for you if you buy the tracks – remember them?

  2. How likely are you to have a professional-quality bookbinding and trimming system at your home? Remember we’re not talking about just buying a printout like you might do at Kinko’s, but buying an honest-to-goodness real, professional-quality book.

    But then again, hmm. In ten or twenty years, maybe we all will have mini-Espressos in our homes. The laser printer started out industrial, too…

  3. Yeah, that microlibrary thing looks a lot like the Internet Bookmobile I mentioned in the article—human-operated printing and bookbinding equipment. The thing that makes the Espresso so special is that it is (intended to be) a pushbutton solution: human wants book, human pushes button, human gets book. Here’s hoping both projects have a bright future.

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