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...

Michael N. Marcus, who I mentioned a few days ago when Amazon subsdiary CreateSpace refused to print his book because it mentioned Amazon (they subsequently called him to apologize and let him know that was a mistake) has written a post comparing books vs. e-books to craft vs. chain pizza. The analogy is made on the basis of typographical matters and quality. After painstakingly examining a 318-page book he’s publishing line by line to make sure that word spacing, hyphenation, and so forth look as good as possible on the page, he received a copy of Dan...

Update: Marcus reports that CreateSpace subsequently apologized and said this warning should not have been sent. On Tuesday, writer Michael N. Marcus submitted the manuscript of his latest book, The Brainy Beginner’s Guide to Self-Publishing, to the CreateSpace print-on-demand service for printing. As one might expect, Amazon came in for some mentions—indeed, given the effect they’ve had on the self-publishing landscape, it would be surprising to see any treatise on self-publishing in the present-day that didn’t mention them. Marcus said that the mentions were “approximately 99% positive.” CreateSpace sent him the following response: The interior file submitted for this title contains text referencing...

On his blog, author Joe Konrath has posted a guest column by his friend and collaborator Blake Crouch. It focuses on the subject of rights reversion—the idea, written into contracts, that once certain conditions are met (or fail to be met), the rights to an author’s books revert back to him, meaning he is free to take them elsewhere or publish them himself. Crouch was unsatisfied with the way his publisher was handling two of his books, Desert Places and Locked Doors—offering them on the Kindle store at $6.99, a price he felt was much too high. He...

I mentioned earlier this month that On Demand Books’s COO said it was poised to expand placement of its Espresso Book Machines to more locations. Now we see how: Engadget reports that Xerox is starting to get behind the Espresso Book Machine in a major way, planning to resell, lease, and service the devices. It seems like a match made in heaven, given that two Xerox printers plus some automation is all an EBM really is. Xerox’s press release reports that Espresso is going to have two booths at Graph Expo 2010 in Chicago October 3-6, and that the...

A few days ago, Book Business ran an interview with Chief Operating Office Tom Allen of On Demand Books, the manufacturer of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) “ATM for books”. We have covered the Espresso a number of times already; it has the potential to bring the full effect of “print on demand” publishing to local bookstores, libraries, and other institutions everywhere. As of the interview, Allen said, there were 51 EBM devices either installed or pending installation—39 in the USA and Canada and 12 overseas. This was up from 9 installed at the beginning of 2009, and...

The Wall Street Journal’s “Speakeasy” blog has an interview with William Gibson, part of a longer piece it will be publishing in the next day or so. This segment focuses on Gibson’s thoughts about the future of book publishing. Gibson notes that, thanks to Twitter, he is experiencing a larger level of fan engagement than he had been able to previously and finding it “more pleasant” than he had expected. He is also able to get a clearer picture of where the book is being released and when. He also notes that he doesn’t see the...