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...

Found via a post on the E-Book Mailing List today, a fantastic blog post by writer Sarah A. Hoyt, that links to an equally fantastic blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which is of related but not identical subject matter to the blog post by Rusch we covered back in March). Rusch’s post, made back in May, is intended to be an eye-opener, a clarion call to the publisher-bound writers that Michael Stackpole analogizes to Roman “house slaves”. Traditional book publishing, Rusch warns, is traveling down the same road that rock music has. She points to examples from music-industry...

Egypt's Library of Alexandria has announced that it's placed 19,000 works from its collection on the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) network, and plans to add another 150,000 Arabic titles soon. The library operates three EBMs, but this also means people around the world can print replicas of the library's titles from their nearest EBM. You can read the press release on On Demand Books' News page. Via INFOdocket...

I just posted about how Amazon, via self-publishing and agent-based publishing, poses a threat to publishers who still haven’t updated their business model to compete. Here’s a post from self-publishing booster J.A. Konrath’s blog that points out one of the reasons why Amazon is such a threat. Responding to one bookstore calling for a boycott of Stirred, the book he’s publishing under Amazon’s new Thomas & Mercer imprint (and which will consequently be placed as printed editions in bookstores as well as published electronically), Konrath points out that he has done a lot for bookstores over the years, and...

On the Self-Publishing Review blog, self-publishing author Rich Evans ponders whether it’s time to go e-book-only on his next self-published title. His first book, Asylum Lake, was self-published via an Espresso Book Machine, giving him a printed 6x9 paperback book for $10 each. He was able to start out with small print runs and sell them for $15 per book, plowing revenues back into getting more copies to have on hand. He did all right selling the print book for a while, especially after promoting it by releasing the first six chapters serially on-line. The Facebook page for the...

WNYC has a look at the Espresso book machine, brainchild of publishing pioneer Jason Epstein. The Espresso takes a digital file, then prints, cuts, and binds it to produce a completed book on demand over the course of a few minutes start to finish. Of course, we’ve covered the Espresso plenty of times in the past, but it’s always interesting to see a look at the device from a new angle. And the article does point out a couple of things I hadn’t known before, such as that sixty years ago, Jason Epstein invented the trade paperback format....

The Bookseller reports that a Nielsen Book study shows that the number of new books being published every year is steadily rising, due largely to the influence of digital and print-on-demand publishing. Of course, this figure comes from the ISBNs that Nielsen issues; if the number of books published without ISBNs (offered for sale directly via websites, local stores, or other means) has also increased, that might make it even greater. This puts me in mind of the old argument about how the Internet has “killed” the music industry, and the oft-heard retort that, no, it’s just hurting the...

David Peck, co-founder of the Mischief & Mayhem Books publishing collective, had an interesting piece in yesterday’s The Daily suggesting that the end of big chain bookstores may be nigh and deservedly so. His argument is based in the economics of bookstores and distributors, in which the retail and middleman companies take most of the slices out of the retail price pie, leaving the publisher with a small sliver to pay its own expenses (including compensating the author). Even the wholesale price of the books isn’t necessarily fixed, as publishers have the clout to pass their own discounts...

The Arizona State University Bookstore is finishing up its first semester with print-on-demand publishing available for a limited selection of textbooks, a service offered through a pilot program in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard. Print-on-demand has been available in some capacity for the greater part of the last decade, but the technology is still in its infant stages, yet to go mainstream. The technology offers students the ability to tell the bookstore staff what books they need and have them printed there in under twelve minutes. The biggest advantage to this is never running out of the books students need. Print-on-demand is...

I’ve mentioned that Wikipedia entries can be collected into bound books, thanks to Wikipedia’s partnership with a print-on-demand publisher. However, Read Write Web reports that boutique publisher James Bridle (whom we’ve mentioned a few times before for other reasons) has gone this idea one better: he has collected five years of the edit history of a Wikipedia entry into a rather handsome twelve volume set of hardcover books. The entry in question is “Iraq War”, and the reason Bridle did it was to point out that historiography is important. Because of Wikipedia’s change-tracking, he notes, we are able to...