Publishers Weekly is reporting that Scribd has teamed up three vendors to provide print on demand service to its customers. Blurb.com will be doing paperback books, HP's MagCloud will be doing periodicals and Mimeo will be for documents of just a few pages. Scribd said that it will be looking for further POD partnerships in the future. Blurb will deliver paperbacks in 7-10 days after an order and it worked out its own API to make publishing of material posted on Scribd an easy thing to do. ...

According to Publisher's Weekly, the maker of the Espresso Book Machine has teamed up with the National Association of College Stores to market the machine to NACS members. The article goes on to say that college stores were the earliest adopters of the machines, with the first machine in North America going to the University of Alberta bookstore in Canada. You can find the full press release here. Thanks to Resource Shelf for the heads up....

John Ingram, Ingram Industries; Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press; Michael Tamblyn, Kobo; Roland Lange, Google Kobo: started by pbook seller who felt was going to loose 5 to 10% of sales to ebooks. Idea was to "compete" with the book seller and keep ebook sales under the same roof. Will be working with publishers, OEM, retailers and carriers. Feel devices will get more and better and that you should be able to read the book on all of them. Book should follow you from device to device. 2m books in catalog and delivered books to 200 countries. Purchased...

Wideman is a two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Wideman has been a National Book Award finalist and is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award. According to Publisher's Weekly, he will be publishing his new book Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, a collection of short stories, through Lulu. Wideman wanted to be in charge and take more control over what happens to his book, the story says. He is also rebelling against what he calls the publishing industries "blockbuster syndrome". The book is being published by an arm of Lulu that is...

Changes: A Vietnamese interface translation has been added. LitRes integration, which was broken in the previous version, has been fixed. HarperCollinsPublishers announced the launch of its Print on Demand (POD) service which will allow Australian and New Zealand readers the chance to purchase individual copies of books that were previously out of print. See the Google Book Monster attack at Book Patrol along with a mind-boggling chart from the Library Copyright Alliance. ...

Cindy Peng at Publishing Trends asks what the iPad can do for “paginated media.” (That’s an interesting thing to call books and magazines, I guess.) She quotes an analyst from a “mediaIDEAS webinar” who points out critical flaws in the iPad’s design, but nonetheless calls the device a “call to action” that could represent “the key to the future of publishing.” In a separate article, Peng also remarks on how much more popular print-on-demand has become in recent years—it’s overtaken traditional publishing in terms of the number of titles available. Perhaps part of this can be linked to...

Editor's Note: This is from the Canadian publication The Mark and is reprinted with permission. It is interesting to see Mark Leslie Lefebvre's hands-on experience with POD. He is Book Operations Manager, Titles Bookstore, McMaster University. Paul Biba In September, Google Book Search announced a special partnership with On Demand Books in New York. Google has been scanning and collecting digital versions of millions of dusty public domain books for close to a decade. Now, through this partnership, readers will have the ability to turn those digital files into locally printed paperbacks. Bookstores equipped with an Espresso Book...

“Effectively BookRiff allows publishers to upload chunks of content, most likely chapters and short stories, to a database. A user can then search the site for interesting chunks and create her own anthology which can then be submitted automatically to a print on demand facility.” – Richard Nash on the service, now in beta (via Michael Cairns). Details: Nonfiction such as textbooks, cookbooks and travel guides, not just short short collections, could benefit. Technorati Tags: BookRiff...

Just how reliable is the Espresso Book Machine, the print-on-demand wonder? A future version might find its way into thousands of coffee shops and repro places. We’ve written oodles of items about the Espresso. And now we wondered if a Wall Street Journal writer was on the mark in raising questions about the Espresso’s reliability. Well, based on a Q&A with the gung-ho Chris Morrow, manager of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, the Espresso is worth all the attention. But, yes, for now at least, it does break down more than he’d like. ...

The Espresso Book Machine could alter the balance of power in publishing---increasing authors’ leverage. Old-fashioned distribution may not count as much. But does anyone know how reliable the Espresso is? Such a question comes up in the latest article on the machine---published in the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt: “Printers are notoriously unreliable, and it will be interesting to see whether these new devices---possibly coming soon to a bookstore near you---will prove any better than those found in offices. The concept is an interesting one, but is it too late? Electronic book readers, like Amazon’s Kindle and...

Sony’s new deals with Smashwords and Author Solutions were progress, all right. People there see a role for Long Tail books---in other words, the non-bestsellers that so often are better than potboilers from the big guys. But how can Sony get these books onto the e-readers, laptops and desktops of consumers? Public libraries are one way. Bypassing the big p-retailers Perhaps Sony should make a special push for this to happen, with special emphasis on title of local interest. Both Sony and the public would win. Yesterday I showed how inept the retail chains could be in their handling of books by local...

Jobs might be lost if I’m not careful. So I won’t even say which book chain it was---just that this little chat happened recently at a store in a liberal city in the D.C. area. Employees were gracious and apologetic in saying why they probably couldn’t carry even a few copies of my Washington novel. The trade paperback wasn’t on The List from the headquarters of their chain. Why? My very legitimate publisher had used print-on-demand-technology, and apparently I was up against the hoary old returns issue. Praised by the same newspaper distributed in the store---but...