By Gloria Quintanilla 2012 felt like a decisive year for print. E-Book sales surpassed print book sales on Amazon for the first time, and widely-read publications like Newsweek decided to give up on print media altogether, and instead to transition fully into digital publishing. All the while, pundits are still debating if there is a future for print in a world dominated by digital formats. Similar discussions are going on between book lovers and authors, who are worried about the publishing industry being ill equipped to respond to their demands. So here's the question: Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Can...

Bookouture is a new digital publishing imprint launched by ex-Harlequin UK marketing controller Oliver Rhodes. Specializing in women’s fiction, Bookouture will publish e-books and print-on-demand globally, paying a 45 percent of net receipts royalty on e-books. “My aim with Bookouture is to focus on creating global author brands and followings—through high-quality editing and particularly through smart, creative digital marketing," Rhodes says. "We’ll be delivering bespoke digital publishing and marketing for every single one of our authors, in a way not always possible at larger publishers. That means focusing very much on the author as [a] brand, and aiming for a select number...

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 Beatts calling my attention to a new blog post with some updated figures—his prior calculations had been based on out-of-date information.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...

One of the biggest problems with the EBM is the lack of titles in its catalog.  Now, Publishers Weekly is reporting that Bookmasters will make its distribution clients' more than 50K POD titles available through the EBM under an agreement with On Demand Books. From the press release: Bookmasters, Inc. and On Demand Books, the company behind the  Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), have entered into an agreement to enable a wide array of  Bookmasters’ distribution clients’ titles to be available through EBM’s fast growing “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel. According to Larry Bennett, Bookmasters’ President of Distribution Services, “this agreement will  allow our...

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...

From CBS New York (1010 WINS): “It allows people to print a book that maybe they can’t otherwise get, some obscure title that happens to be in the public domain. This machine brings to our collection an additional eight million titles that are in the public domain or that are copyrighted but the publishers are allowing to be a part of our library,” Linda Johnson, President of the Brooklyn Public Library told 1010 WINS. [Clip] Another great option that users have when using the machine is to print and publish their own work. “People are doing quite a lot of self-publishing,” Johnson said. “Because...

From Shelf Awareness: HarperCollins today is launching its Comprehensive Backlist Program that will enable independent bookstores with Espresso Book Machines to promote much of the company's backlist through a combination of "a core assortment" of printed books on the shelves and in-store "digital-to-print at retail." The program encompasses thousands of adult trade paperback titles and some YA paperbacks. For now, illustrated books, picture books and some other titles are not included.The program officially begins at 1 p.m. Eastern time, when the initial nine participating stores will simultaneously print a copy of Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett. (Patchett became an independent...