We've watched with interest as a few new digital publishing-related startups have launched seemingly out of the blue over the past few weeks. Thin Reads, a fantastic new website that runs reviews of e-singles, is definitely one of our favorites, and we're clearly not alone; the site has been enjoying a ton of mostly glowing press. (Click to see what Mashable, Paid Content, and MediaBistro's GalleyCat have to say about the new site.) But there's another interesting and brand-new startup known as Blackstrap that hasn't been getting quite as much love lately. In fact, we hadn't even heard of it until we...

South African IT news site IT Web reports that the University of Johannesburg has just acquired an Espresso Book Machine of its very own. Most of the article summarizes what we already well know about the print-on-demand machine and its uses for printing and binding store-quality paperbacks in mere minutes, but it does quote On Demand Books as projecting over 150 machines installed world-wide by the end of 2012. It also links to a Guardian article from 2009 in which the head of marketing for UK bookstore chain Blackwell suggested that the Espresso “has the potential to be the...

About a month ago, I covered a blog post by Alan Beatts, proprietor of the Borderlands bookstore in San Francisco, in which he did some back-of-envelope calculations to determine that it could take over a decade for profits to pay down the cost of an Espresso. I just now received an email from Mr. Beatts calling my attention to a new blog post with some updated figures—his prior calculations had been based on out-of-date information. Based on the new figures, Beatts now calculates that, at an average rate of 1 book an hour, the machine would pay itself off...

A few days ago I mentioned the Harvard Book Store, which features an Espresso Book Machine which it uses to help it stay relevant in its market, and pondered why it is that more stores aren’t following its example. As it turns out, Alan Beatts has a definitive answer to that on the blog of his San Francisco bookstore Borderlands Books. Beatts ran the numbers for the cost of the machine, materials, and operations, versus how long it would take to pay down those costs at various rates. He determined that if he averaged one book an hour over...

Speaking of the Espresso, a digital publisher’s paen to self-publishing through it led me to a blog post from last year in which librarian Rick Anderson of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library discussed the Espresso’s pros and cons in a bit greater depth than I’ve seen other posts go into. The problems Anderson found mainly have to do with a few technical glitches in the device itself, particularly due to the desert climate of his library being drier than the Espresso was originally designed for. Also, the device has a 45-minute-to-1-hour warmup time due to the glue...

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s latest column is a look at the motives behind Amazon’s competitive behavior, and how it might end legacy publishing. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that Shatzkin spends the first half of the post giving the devil his due, explaining why Amazon has been looking so good to so many people with manuscripts they want to get out there. If you’ve got the manuscript in hand and you have a choice between [spending months to go from manuscript to published book and earning lower royalties] and having books to show your...

Everyone is paying attention to the e-book pricing fight against Amazon right now, but Bloomberg Businessweek reports there’s another disagreement going on between Amazon and the publishers behind the scenes that nobody has really noticed: the question of print on demand. Amazon already offers its own print on demand services, used for mainly for small independent or self-publishing, and the technology has gotten a lot better over the fifteen years since it was introduced—print-on-demand titles are by now largely indistinguishable from large-print-run paperbacks. The rub is that Amazon would like to expand its print-on-demand operations so that it can print copies of...

I’ve mentioned a time or two the personalized Disney’s Jungle Book children’s book tie-in that my parents got for me one Christmas. Printed in a rough font that I retrospectively recognized as coming from a mainframe line printer, it would never pass muster in the print-on-demand world of today, though as I pointed out when I first mentioned it, there are print-on-demand operations that exist to do much the same thing today in more polished form. Well, lately I’ve heard (via Galleycat) about one that takes the cake for sheer chutzpah. Rather than producing original fiction with the names...

I reported on a story last April in which the algorithms of two used-book-listing bots resulted in a $23.7 million used textbook. Now here are a pair of recent stories about it happening again—in both directions. First of all, Carlos Bueno wrote a self-published children’s book called Lauren Ipsum, about understanding how computers work. He priced it at $14.95 on Amazon—then he discovered a pair of third-party-vendor bots listing the book at around the $55 mark. These bots would, presumably, place an order from Amazon for the $15 book as soon as someone ordered the $55 one, then sell...

Does electronic publishing technology mean the end of the paper book? Not at all, argues Clive Thompson on Wired.com. Just as the “paperless office” actually used more paper than ever, the advent of self-publishing technologies like the Espresso Book Machine means that people will have the ability to create custom one-off books for every situation. It’s a bit of an obvious insight to us, of course, but the piece does have some interesting anecdotes about the ways the Espresso can be used. For example: Print-on-demand books can also become plastic—altered on the...

I got to the Missouri State University Bookstore in Columbia, Missouri in the early afternoon, and went downstairs to where they kept their Espresso machine. As I had a book made, I spoke with Heather Tearney, the manager of the Mizzou Media section where the machine was kept, and Nic Maglio, one of the operators. The book I picked out was The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar, by Maurice Leblanc. (Here’s the Project Gutenberg version.) I’d hoped to get another Arsène Lupin book that I had myself contributed to Project Gutenberg, but they didn’t have it available from the catalog—though...

It’s a cliché that the elderly are out of touch with the future, and prefer to cling to the way things were in the past rather than moving forward into the future. But there are plenty of exceptions to every rule, and 83-year-old Jason Epstein, the man behind the Espresso “ATM for books” is one of them. The Frankfurt Book Fair blog is carrying an article based on an interview with him about what he sees as the future of the publishing industry. Epstein first learned about “disintermediation”—the practice of removing middle-men from transactions—back in the 1980s, but it’s...