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Books on Demand
DreamerFi writes: "It's going to cost about $30k. Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes. Having finished with one title, it can proceed to another and another, as long as the machine is kept supplied with ink, toner, and paper-the same regular copy paper you might buy at Staples. It's called the PerfectBook Machine. How soon before your local book store has one?"
Now we can have a Barnes and Nobles in each Starbucks, instead of vice versa!
You don't hang out in alt.ebooks much do you? There are people doing just this. The software they use is set to auto-scan and auto-OCR. The person flips pages and lets the scanner work. The uncorrected copy is then posted to the group and people proofread it. After a bit, the thing is considered correct and becomes part of the pile of finished books.
...I meant "per unit" as in "individual book" not as "book making machine"
.pdf, have the printed version arrive at my door.
I envisioned one of these being set up in my local copy store. E-mail them the
Probably should have been clearer about that...
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Right now the technology is a bit expensive and slow to be used to replace conventional publishing methods. However in time it is going to get cheap enough with good enough quality that the major bookstore chains are going to be able to invest in these machines and come up with licensing deals with the major (and minor) publishers.
In time, yes, what will happen is that the copies of books on the shelves will be strictly display copies for people to browse through. When they find a copy of a book they like, they go up to the counter or perhaps a kiosk and punch in an order for a book they want and then they go and pick up their order at some counter in the bookstore. Through the bookstore's website you can go and order up a bunch of books and then drive down and pick them up in person. Or you can do the mail order thing if you're too lazy to do that.
In the end the people who lose are the small bookstores and the chains like Amazon who are going to get nailed in the convenience factor business unless they can do enough a discount for the reduced expense of not maintaining a series of stores all over the place.
Traditional presses are not going to go away. The Harry Potter books and other hyped up books will still be cheaper on the mass runs. So there will be shipping even so. However stores are likely to under-order and make it up on the print-on-demand side, assuming the publishers go for that. Likely as not there will be some tug-of-war on the major releases between publisher and seller.
Prices should drop in the vanity press business though, and you'll see more self-publishing going on. People who want to publish books can have a button on their website that will refer you to some print-on-demand shop that has the book in the catalog. The writer will probably pay some fee for having their book stored on the site but if enough books get published the rental fee is waived and there might even be a profit (worse than going through a main publisher, but it is a way to get a track record).
Of course once electronic paper gets good enough in quality that a bound book filled with epaper is economical and comfortable to use, expect to see the rules go out the window.
Well, if more books become available in a digital format, how much time will it take before "Bookster"....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Your point about selling the machine is correct.
Now imagine that 5 years from now the machine costs $2000. What happens to the book publishing industry then?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
An interesting machine, doubt it will make it to B&N. Kinkos perhaps...
SPOON!!!
Yes, but whats that got to do with the price of tea in D'ni?
No... hate to break it to you, but printing a 200 page book and cover, no matter what the print run, will set you back more than $.40 cents a book.
I read this article, but couldn't find any per-book printing costs.
How many pages is your book?
What dimensions?
How many halftones?
What paper stock?
What sort of binding?
What soft of stock for the cover?
How many colors on the cover, and interior?
The rest of your post makes it sound like you know most of what you're talking about, so it leaves me a little confused when you ask for a flat price, when so many things can vary so much. Paper flucuates incredibly, for instance, and no two books are exactly alike.
it stays exactly where it is right now... Print on demand is already here. Printers already exist. It takes more than an author to create a book, but if the author wants to go it alone, they can, so long as they've got some money in their pockets.
Buying this machine will not get you a list of every bookstore in the country. Nor will it supply you with your own block of ISBNs. Nor will it get you into Igram's price lists. Nor will it have your book publicized or reviewed. Nor does it get your book editted, proofread, etc...
All this thing does is print books. Offset printers already exist. On demand printers exist. It doens't fundamentally change the industry.
I have been taking bookbinding lessons for the past year and a half. During this time I have read a lot about te craft and its interesting to see it come full circle. Twice. Okay, maybe a stretch...
but originally books were so expensive to produce that a town might chip in money to buy one book. Someone with half a dozen books was considered was considered wealthy. With moveable press and the introduction of paper books started to become quite affordable. You would pick the book you wanted bound and have a bookbinder bind it in material to match your library. (or you could afford, leather being considered at some points cheap - velvet was the choice of kings!) Today books are affordable by everyone. As someone who binds books now, I understand how materials and time can quickly make a hand bound book quite expensive. The "Perfect" binding of this machine is actually quite inferior to traditional techniques that are much more durable. Anyways, you *might* now get a custom bound book with this machine - picking a cover to match your library.
Here is the website for the company behind these machines (rather basic and short on details)
Perfect Systems LLC
Note that they do appear to be using standard printers (potentially even one from Xerox - so their patents etc. probably cover the cutting, binding, and collating features (to get the cover printed on one printer combined with the book printed on another) - thus I suspect there may be an issue with durability - though modern printers are MUCH better than copiers were years ago... but still different from regular book presses.
-- Join us in Chicago May 1-4th for MeshForum -- writer, historian, tech geek, entrepreneur, internet junky since '91 --
I know you read that novel.
Blar.
Commercial publishers will like this about as much as music companies like CD burners.
smile, it makes everyone else wonder what you're up to
Ah man, modding me down. Perhaps I should have just settled for a copy of William Gibson's Idoru to be spit out.
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Well let me know if the first time you fire this thing up, a naked girl crawls out.
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1) The "books" this thing will produce will look more like magazines, with the owners of the text subsidizing the cover price by selling ads. Want the ad-free version? That's gonna cost you extra.
2) For those of you who argue that 8.5 x 11 is a lousy size for a book, there's no earthly reason why the thing can't be loaded with multiple sizes of paper, from foolscap-octavo up to crown-double-quad-folio and just select the most appropriate size to minimize trimming.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
It prints cheap copies. On copier paper.
I like a good book. I read a lot (not as much as I used to though - work, work, work) and I always buy the hardcover edition if I can.
A book is more than the sum of the paper and what's written on it. It's also how it looks. Feels. Real books are printed on real paper. An old book is yellowish. A new book smells great. There was an artist who designed the cover. Another one responsible for the typeface and the paper. Maybe a third one did the illustrations. I like it that way.
This machine would be analogous to some automated kitchen that can produce a huge variety of gourmet meals at the touch of a button, but all the food would look like cheeseburgers. A delicious rack of New Zealand lamb, in cheeseburger form. Oh, this burger tastes like lobster! And this one's John Dory! Wow.
Not for me, thank you.
When the radio arrived, they said: Well, that's the end of the newspaper.
When the TV arrived, they said: Well, that's the end of the radio.
When the Internet arrived, they said: Well that's the end of radio, TV and newspaper.
All three of them are still around, and probably will stay around for a couple of eons. There will be no such thing as a paperless society.
----
... sometimes I fly with the white swan to my Liffey home.
What do you think it will take for people to move from paper based to "ebook" type devices?
E-paper with an equal or higher resolution than the average book is printed at.
In other words, something that actually provides real advantages over carrying a paperback book, but shares a very similar/familiar form. The page-turning interface is probably hard-wired in there for everyone over the age of, say, 5...
deus does not exist but if he does
Actually, modern "toner" is similar to plastic, and it should outlast the paper it's fused to.
Copiers and laser printers now produce output that should last centuries on good paper, even when exposed to continuously high light levels.
The problem isn't longevity, it's quality. Digital publication still lags far behind good old letterpress in readability and sharpness. Enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of a well-designed letterpress book can be a wonderful experience.
-David.
Paper class? What kind of school was this? Are you a materials engineer? Sounds interesting.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Well, you can take a Palm into the can... just don't drop it.
Of course, the same goes for a regular book.
Hey, there's an idea -- bog-proof portable e-book readers! Woo!
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You'd be surprised how much thinner things seem when duplexed.
Right, they seem half as big. Smartass.
But the point is that printing lengthy HOWTOs and such is ridiculous mostly because they're twice as big as they need to be, and I've had very, *very* little luck getting laser printers not to mangle the page on the second time through. Autoduplexers rox0rz.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Pfah. Say that at an AFL-CIO meeting, and see how quickly they stone you.
Show this machine to the people who run its dangerous, complicated, unreliable predecessors, and see how far you get.
Show an American laborer the Southeast Asian immigrant who earns a bag of Doritos a month and claim greater efficiency... eww.
Of course, this will go over like gangbusters with management. Labor will hate it with a passion. UPS too.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
What about GSView (Windows and Linux) and MacGS (Mac)? Those happen to be *free* (speech 'n' beer) PostScript viewers. Err... what kind of system sends
Yes, both PDF and PostScript are Adobe standards. The difference is, PostScript created by anyone actually has to run on anyone's PostScript-interpreting printer. PDF created by Adobe's `Distiller' has to work with Adobe's viewer. Period. Hence the creep of little prorietary incompatibilities that plague free PDF viewers...
Maybe I wasn't clear... by `export', I meant `print to file'. Ooh, look, PostScript. Cross-platform PostScript. Of course, MS's PostScript drivers suck eggs, but at least they work...
Okay. Summing up. PostScript does everything that PDF does, except it's standardized (PDF has a standard, but it's kind of like MS's standard API(you know, where they leave out cool bits that only they can use).) Viewers are available everywhere and for every platform. Adobe *created* a market where there was no need to sell their `Distiller' tools. ps2pdf does much the same thing.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
http://www.adobe.com/print/features/psvspdf/main.h tml
That's a little note from the product manageer for Adobe InDesign, their New! Spiffy! Incredibly Expensive! tool which, instead of just using an embedded preview, actually Executes the PostScript! and shows you what you're Really Getting!
Uh, yeah. GhostView's been doing that for how long now?
Any `benefits' of PDF are strictly in the fields of multimedia and hypertext. The downside -- you're tied to Adobe's murky `standard' that they and only they are accountable for -- far outweighs any benefits.
Note that you need something called `Extreme' to directly print PDFs. Wanna bet it contains the same closed Supa Secret PDF Decoding Rules that Adobe doesn't publish in their standards?
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
And, of course, there will be those weirdos who insist on printing out every interesting article they read, only to toss them in a huge pile...
How can one man go through an entire toner cartridge (LaserJet 4Plus) in a month?!
Ahem. Yes, I know someone like this.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Remainders are the cheap books that are usually piled near the registers, or outside. They're typically overstocks or titles that didn't sell well in the first place.
So, you can buy a new hardcover when it is released at full price, or search the bargain bins for the 10 millionth copy of 'Rainbow Six' and only pay a few bucks.
I guess I would rather sit in a beautiful old forest, reading from my ebook, than sit among stumps flipping the paper pages of an old fashoned book.
"You can't have everything. Where would you keep it?" -- Steven Wright
Now you aren't restricted to just the one edition of a classic that the bookstore decided to carry. I was looking for Huck Finn the other day, and the bookstore had 3 different editions. I know there are many more than that, but I was looking for one with footnotes etc. to explain the terms for a non-native English speaker.
A bookstore can now carry *ALL* editions of every publisher's backlist. Print out *ONE* copy of all the books in a given area, then when a customer browses one and buys it, generate an order to print up the same edition as the replacement for the shelf. Even faster than waiting for the book-printer. But if they still don't find the book they want, then do the search and print it right then and there.
Want the 2nd edition instead of the 6th? Fine, same price. Want the version with complete footnotes and historical essays? Want a book of all of Mark Twain's stories that used the word "fraudulent"? It's all just bit-pushing at this point.
Instant publishing takes on a new meaning. Web sites can publish a review of a new work, then offer to send it to your corner book-printer for you to pick up in 30 minutes. Both companies make a little, you win a lot.
Create a web page which will search for all genealogy information for a given name, then format it nicely and print out the book. Voil!
Textbooks? Of course. Now the biggest cost would not be printing, shipping and storing the paper, the largest cost would be the author's royalties. Talk about instant feedback!
These are all million-dollar ideas here, given away for free.
DZ
The thing comes in a kiosk mode, where you can walk into any 7-11, browse in a webesque interface, pay with a credit card, and walk out with your book and a Slurpee.
More importantly, you could shop and purchase any book in any language from anywhere, and come away with a uniform product. Think of the development possibilities in Africa, or traveling in Russia and running out of books to read on the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Will book publishers still make too many copies of [Stephen King/Robert Ludlum/Garfield]? Of course, because they sell to the mass market, but if I WANT a copy of "Steal This Book" in Japanese, I could get it with this machine.
Of course, it'll never happen, since printing the book will take too long, and you're eliminating an entire supply chain of bookmakers, but it's a nice idea.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
The problem becomes:
Us: My out of print book doesn't have a digital version for print on demand.
Them: I'm sorry, we are generating digital versions for in demand books and your request isn't in demand.
So the books you desire will remain unobtainable until someone gets around to it unless it is a highly valued book. The hardest part about great technology like this is "the man" still controls the access. It will work great for books that already have a digital version even if the version isn't the appropriate one for the printer.
"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive." ~ Spock
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
Publishers are seeing books being returned at a ridiculous level right now. They upped production when the rapidly expanding mega chains (Borders, BN) were building new stores and ordering more books to fill their shelves (and when Amazon was building and stocking new warehouses) - they thought the increased orders meant more people were buying books, paying no attention to the fact that all that was really growing was the amount of shelf space. Once the new shelf space was filled, as it is now, the orders dropped again. Traditional return levels are around 20% - they've been seeing returns up to near 45% for some books and some stores. These books cost money to print and transport - the cost of return shipping for these books is also borne by the publishers. These costs are passed along to us as consumers.
I think this highlights one of the best, and corporate friendly, uses of digital technology to transmit media. I don't want a copy of a book printed out by me and bound together with some binder clips - I want a real book with a real binding. I don't want a blank cd-r with no printed track listing - I want a cd with cover art, jewel case, and inserts with information. In both the book and music publishing industry, equipping stores with high-quality manufacturing units that could produce professional cds or books from a digital catalog would be a great way to increase the stores available titles, lower cost of production (through eliminating waste), and demonstrate that they are selling a value-added product, it's not just the text or the sounds they're selling, they're selling books or cds. I still really enjoy browsing, and find many of my favorite purchases that way, so I don't want stores to go away or be replaced by these manufacturing kiosks, I just think they would be a great addition, and would be a great way of keeping marginal, small-audience titles in the catalogue.
The thing that holds them back I think is not so much the price of the hardware, but the lack of content.
But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
iUniverse is cool - they will take any book you own the intelectual property for and make it available to all bookstores with an ISBN and standard ordering systems, for basically nothing. If you have a book that you wrote that went out of print, send them a copy and they scan it and for free, it is now back in and you can earn roalties. If you just wrote a new book and want it published, they'll do that too for a few hundred bucks send you a few copies and make your book available.
iUniverse doesn't do editing or promotion or anything like that, but that could be handled by a standard publisher. When Amazon or someone else orders up some copies, iUniverse prints them out and ships them off, on demand with no wasted money for storage of unwanted books.
They have a number of titles that would otherwise be unavailable, and will have those titles available "forever".
From what I understand, they seem to be set up to publish one's books in perpetuity. After they get a book together (manuscript, cover, edits, etc.) they make it available via the web, phone order, as well as through any traditional bookstore or places like Amazon.com via the standard ISBN ordering abilities. Whenever they get an order for a book, they print one, send it off, and cut a cheque for the author.
I don't think they do any promotion of the books, but for out of print books by previously published authors they also don't seem to charge any fee, so it seems like a no-risk (or at least minimal risk) type of activity.
Their different publishing programs are here
There might be similar places around, and I don't know how good this place is, but I do know of at least one very good technical Macintosh book who's author is using this service.
I cannot imagine Xerox letting a patent like this going unchallenged, when they have had their Docutech system out for years. True, their system does not do the custom cutting, and thus has a more limited range of paper sizes, but this does seem more evolutionary than revolutionary.
I think the affect will be the opposite of what you propose. You point out, correctly I think, that "A book's ability to be sold often depends on it being on a shelf." A b&m bookstore has limited amounts of shelving space. The big publishers and book distributors exercise enormous control over what books are available on the shelves, their positions, how much space they get, etc. If you want an obscure book or even a not so obscure book, you may not find it because it has been squeezed out for one more copy of a King novel. And if you can't get it now, you may not bother to order it. With the machine, you could print any book it had in its inventory. Theoretically, an infinitely long bookshelf. An ideal solution might be a super store with one copy of tens of thousands of titles for browsing and then (more advanced) printing engines that produce the books. It could still print titles not on display but the display space wouldn't have to double as warehouse space. Therefore more display space would be available for other titles. Of course, it could also be monopolized in the same way it is now. But at least you wouldn't be worse off as far as browsing is concerned and you would be better off with respect to instant gratification.
Q:How many libertarians does it take to stop a Panzer division? A:None. Obviously market forces will take care of it.
...was the Bible
Piracy won't be a problem. Since most of the cost of the books will be in the printing. Why would you stiff an author for his $1 when it will still cost $5-$10 just to print it? Sure, some big outfit might run off a bunch of pirate copies, but, they do that now.
Also, until we start using reflective displays, it'll be hard to read documents while sitting out in a bright sunny park. I'd prefer a book over an LCD display any day (not that I don't drag my thinkpad outside anyway)
The XEROX DocuTech isn't far off though. I've seen these things in action and it's pretty hardcore.
Of the $39.95 sale price of an O'Reilly book, about 1% is the cost of production. The other 99% is what you are paying the publisher and the author. Your cost doesn't include this, so the actual cost to insta-print an O'Reilly book is more like $70+.
I'm sure that a year or more ago I read an article in our local newspaper (in Christchurch, New Zealand) about a company that had just installed a book making machine like this, it took the book in digital form in one end and spat out a nice paper form of the book at the other.
NZ Electronics Enthusiasts: Check out my Trade Me Listings
No, no -- customer browses magazine rack, sips a grande Starbucks and noshes a muffin, THEN walks to other end of machine. Cha-CHING! This is a Barnes and Noble dream.
Gimme.
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"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Yup... nothing like a good book in which you can write your own notes and comments, tear out pages, put in bookmarks, etc.
This machine, if it ever sees widespread use, will do for books what Napster and P2P did for music and other online media. We will have the ability to bypass the entire publishing industry, thus going straight from the author to the reader/buyer with only this machine as the step between.
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Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
More likely the latest edition of "Big Uns".
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
Browsing. Otherwise you might as well use Amazon for the books.
And if there's a magazine I'll buy without browsing, I'll already have a subscription.
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
But that is changing as current publishers are putting most of their new stock into electornic format that would be suitable, and places like iUniverse build libraries of titles available on demand.
The concept of iUniverse is a good one, because publishers have been old-boy clubs for a long time. But there's much more to publishing a book -- and giving it credibility -- than having machinery to make copies.
Disclaimer: I'm a writer and an editor.
A few months ago, a local publisher put out -- using POD via the printing company for one of the iUniverse-type front operations -- a book with a quirky take on the U.S. Civil War. It was the result of six years of research, but the book was unreadable.
It took two more years of working with the author to smooth the flow and architecture, enhance the color of the writing, make the style consistent (right down to consistent spelling of place-names), patch holes in the story, get permissions for illustrations, develop cover artwork, and have the book reviewed by experts to uncover factual errors.
Had this author (who, like most authors, think they have a finished book when they complete the last sentence) gone right to a POD operation, the results wouldn't have been close to the remarkable and captivating book it is today -- selling very well, too.
In so many /. discussions outside the realm of technology, there's a lack of understanding that creative efforts to not burst fully mature from the womb of the mind!
DennisThis piece of machinery is amazing, and if publisher's are smart, they'll jump on this. Of course, I'm not going to argue that publishers of any kind of medium are smart, so we'll have to wait and see.
The publishers who believe in objects -- the books themselves, as opposed to 'pure' content, so to speak -- are smart not to jump on this.
Why? Because such books have no archive value whatsoever.
Unlike printing ink, most POD uses toner -- carbon with heat glue -- like any laser printer. From text to illustration, a POD book deteriorates fairly rapidly. Try putting your favorite laminated bookmark in one and watch the toner peel off the page onto the bookmark a few days or weeks later. Furthermore, the illustrations are irregular in density and the choice of paper is limited (and is never acid-free quality unless that is specified and paid handsomely for ... impossible if you're going to your local Barnes & Noble for a copy).
Your typical paperback from 1971 will be around longer than your POD book from 2001.
This gives publishers a niche marketplace for presentation quality which they can exploit. So long as the electronic original remains in print, you can get a new POD copy to replace the tatty mess your POD book will soon become.
But then, that brings us back to rights...
DennisWith this system, the above situation is impossible. The book doesn't exist until I buy it. Sure, I can "flip through it" on a computer monitor, just like I can on Amazon. Though, I can honestly say I've never bought a random book off Amazon.
This point has been made many times during this discussion, and I could not disagree more. Although this may not be the case for you and others, I find books on amazon every day (yes, I actually browse amazon for a couple of minutes every day) that I would never come across in a bookshop, and I frequently buy them. Believe you me, when 95% percent of all books published the last 100 years or so are less than 6 clicks away on Amazon, you're bound to come across more of them than you are in any book store, no matter how big. And, as a sidenote, at least for me reading reviews gives me a better impression of a book than "flipping it's pages", and I'm sure I'm not alone on that one.
I'd very much like to see some statistics on how many "obscure" books are bought of amazon versus how many are bought in book stores. Chances are such a survey would prove you and others wrong in a rather dramatic way.
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
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How about a cheaper cost for ebooks. I have a Rocket E-book (now owned by RCA) and the price of ebooks is still prohibitive. The vast majority of ebooks for sale are sold either at the same price of the print book, or just a little under that. Either way, if it's just $1 more for the print book, I'll go out and buy the frickin' paper edition. IMHO, it's much easier and much more fun to flip through the pages of an actual book, than it is to press a page down or page up button. About the only books that are really a considerable amount cheaper are the classics, and most of those can be downloaded from project Gutenburg for free.
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If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
One solution is to create a pre-master document (in PostScript, DVI, Word, or whatever), RIP it to a set of page bitmaps, proof the pages, and then use those page images from then on - you know that each printer will produce exactly the same bitmap. Page images are big, though, and if you want to keep a lot of books ready for print-on-demand, storage (or bandwidth to a central site) is an issue. In a previous job, I helped develop JBIG2, which is a compression format for black-and-white (1 bit per pixel) document images, which makes the space issue pretty much go away - we had a test document which was a 500-page book, rendered at 600dpi. The uncompressed page bitmaps were about 1.5GB, but we were able to achieve 1000:1 lossless compression using JBIG2. The entire book could fit on a floppy...
Rendering speed is also an issue - PostScript can be quite slow to interpret. One of JBIG2's design goals was very fast decompression, and we were able to print that 500 page book in under 3 minutes (on a Xerox 180ppm printer); the decompression time was well under 1 minute.
Yeah, all it takes is a stack scanner, some Xerox software, and clicking on that 'Begin' button.
Hmm... for some odd reason I don't have a stack scanner in my house. Gee, I guess I should buy one.
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#nohup cat
Now we can copy books with ease.
Well, no. See, something a lot of people forget is that in order to digitally copy a book it must first be digitized, which is a daunting task for the average person with a scanner, OCR or not. Are you going to take apart a book, scan each page, then put them into a pdf file? Didn't think so. It's a far stretch from ripping songs from a CD.
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#nohup cat
The "books in digital format" in question would seem to be residing on a private network. I assume that means each $30k machine would eventually come with a service plan to download books on demand from a private centralized server, and then cached locally I assume. I suppose someone could front the $30k to just download, convert, & distribute as many books in digital format to the wArEz scene, but you'd have to pay a royalty for each one you download I assume, part of the service plan. Doesn't seem really worthwhile, at least from what I gathered from the article.
I seriously doubt that they'd send it over the internet if it's that large. But I doubt that it's that huge. I'd imagine that the system sends something in a proprietary format along the lines of a PDF. The local machine would do the setup. I mean, the publishing houses probably have some setup image for books already. Add in a local hardrive, and it wouldn't need to download most books more than once.
I'd see this used in small/medium publishers and the larger bookstores. For a premium you can get a copy of the out of stock book NOW. Of course, a fee goes to the owner of the copyright for each book printed. Maybe have a system where the company that produces these acts as a go-between. They'd total up all the books produced each month, collect the royalties, and send the money to each of the copyright holders.
Firethorn
I don't read AC A human right
The ability to be able to check out and access the entire book is vital for me when I want to consider which book to buy.
One of the best applications of this machine would be for books that are out of copyright, or whose authors have intentionally made them free as in beer (examples). In that case, you can have your cake and eat it too: check out the book for free on the CRT, and then if you like it, get a bound copy printed up.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
If the per-unit price is decent enough, maybe I can start restocking my bookshelves
All this for only $30,000!!!!
.....but wait, THERE'S MORE!!!
Seriously though, from the article, they envision this machine used primarily in parts of the world where book distribution is non-existant, or to print really hard-to-find works.
I dont see the price dropping, it will be something libraries, or maybe bookstores, pick up; and they will most likely have to pay whoever holds the rights to that particular book every time they print a copy. The price is prohibitive, this is NOT going to be a Napster. By the time the price drops to anything an individual could reasonably afford, the copyright protections will have long been established.
--------
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
For a 6-time-a-year loose-leaf service we investigated the cost of printing on demand using photocopying technology vs. printing a fixed number of copies using offset printing.
The print-on-demand approach was several times as expensive as the photocopying approach that this machine appears to use.
The implication is that even with a 50 per cent return rate mentioned in the article, it is still cheaper for publishers to use conventional printing methods for mass market books.
The device might have a use for out-of-print books but then the local demand would have to justify the capital cost of the equipment, the maintenance and staffing.
The machines would, in any case, be competing with electronic delivery of books over the Internet, which would always be cheaper and faster. A large number people, perhaps most, will take the cheaper and faster approach even if the format isn't as convenient.
Once you look at the drawbacks of print-on-demand, it looks like it will be at best another device that fills a niche in the market rather than supplanting all other methods.
Truck drivers, packagers, mailpersons, box suppliers, label makers, book binders, librarians, clerks (assuming this would be automated), and all the associated support staff (accountants, managers, binder-repair technicians, HR personel, etc.) would all be affected. For any organization of sufficent size, at least some downsizing would occur. One hope for these people is that they could find jobs related to the automated book-making industry.
science is a religion
Exactly. I've been struggling for years as a poor writer and have realised that I better serve as an editor and wish to be a publisher...but I lack the funds to start a major publishing company. Looking at prices from my local full press printer, I cry. THIS I could save up for or get a mortgage on and kick start my publishing company into high gear with minimal (the price of a car! I can drive my Escort forever!) investment... put the books on the 'net
-Mynn the Museless
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
Yes, and it's been around a while, too...
Of course, something that could actually do a decent binding job would be nice. "Perfect" is nothing of the sort. I'd take comb over that most of the time, and any idiot can give Kinkos a few bucks and get it in minutes. One of the reasons I often buy copies of things freely available, because I want it to last through more than two readings.
Oh, and if you think professional perfect bind sucks, you should try those do-it-yourself machines...
For a number of years there has been the ability for Music Stores to print CDs and the CD jackets when a customer requests something they don't have in stock. Blockbuster Music I know at one time could do this. But it never caught on. And the benefits mentioned (esoteric, out of print, etc) didn't come through either. It was mostly a clever idea that just couldn't pay for itself.
Hell, I want one at the local Kinkos....
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
Hey, it all depends on what you want to use. Most college and high school textbooks are printed on double glossy paper, which is usually pretty acid-free, so it doesn't degrade as fast. Or, much cheaper is the stock "white" paper, for stuff that you need now, but don't care if it looks slightly brown from aging in a couple of years. (It's also fairly acid-free, but it's also a lot less expensive...)
Most soft-cover fiction books also use a lower quality of paper then the hard-cover equivalents, simply because the soft-covers are much more mass produced. And also, most of those books don't have color pages unless they are hard-cover, so again, there is a major price differential.
Yes, it does come down to getting what you paid for. Most people who would use this for "home publishing" rigs would probably buy the cheaper paper, just because it is cheaper, and it still looks reasonably good for a couple of years.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Well, if a 'bookstore' relies on this machine to print out all the titles it carries, I'd hate to be them every time a new Harry Potter books comes out. If they follow the "print-on-demand" idea, you can't print extras and hope you'll sell them or it defeats the idea in the first place (and in all these concepts, you're eliminating any storage areas). So if they get swamped, they're screwed.
Second, most copy machines, even the color ones, cannot generally produce the same quality you see on standard soft-cover books. And if you don't think that the covers help sell books, you are so wrong that it's not even funny.
Third, these machines cannot do true hard-covers. Sure you can run cardstock paper through them, but that's only 200 grams/square meter, and for those people who like hard-cover books, there is no substitute.
Yes, it's neat. It's got that 'whiz-bang' shiny "new tech" feel to it. Is it revolutionary? Hardly. Is it going to majorly upset the publishing industry as we know it? Not a chance in Hell(tm).
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Okay, I didn't get that from it. From what I know about the machines I work with, it's practically impossible to have a machine the size that this one is described at be able to hardcover 'pages' through the machine, at least along the same path the paper takes. I'm not saying it's impossible, just unlikely. It would require a straight path from where the cover material is stored, to where it will be finally placed for the binding.
Furthermore, the thicker a material is, the more force is needed to cut it. And, it's much more likely for the blade to 'jump' when it goes from cutting thicker covers to thinner paper. Whereas with cardstock or gloss card covers, it is so little of a difference as to hardly be a difference at all.
Again, I'm not saying it's impossible. If this machine can print hardcover and softcover books, more power to them. But from the article, I tend to think it's just softcover.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Depends. If it can photocopy directly from a paper original, it can print in whatever font the original is in. (Note, a lot of machines no longer have direct photocopying, like the aforementioned Xerox Docutech 6115.) If it can only read .pdf files, it will be in whatever font the converted to .pdf was in. But since you can really easily convert most any file type to a .pdf, it's no biggie. So yes, it should be able to handle any font (that the computer recognizes, otherwise it does nasty things like change it to Courier), layout, etc.
Is it worth spending 30 grand on? Okay, I'm biased, I work at a Kinko's, so I know the pricing there... it really depends on how much you do. If you own/lease this thing, you save money by not paying Kinko's/Staples/Copy Max/whoever to do it for you, but you do have to pay for your own paper, ink, toner, replacement parts and repairs (depending on your license).
There's also training time involved in learning how to use these things. A lot of machines are not intuitive to use. If, however, this is intended for a wider market, it just might have a useful manual (unlike a few machines I could mention), and be fairly easy to use.
Personally, I'd let Kinko's handle it if I had to do any large scale printing even if I had one of these. But if I had 30 grand to throw around, I'd probably get a better computer before getting this... priorities and all.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Yes, I read the article. And the thing of it is, why would any bookstore in their right mind pay 30 grand for one of these?
Let's say a soft-cover book costs $5.95. Round to $6 for convienence. Now, at that price, a bookstore could buy 5,000 books. But wait, bookstores don't buy them at that price, otherwise they wouldn't make any money. Let's say, for sake of arguement, that the bookstore gets them for $1.50. Now they can buy 20,000 books.
That is enough to keep your average Waldenbooks or B. Dalton's stocked for some time. And that doesn't even take into account the costs of paper, ink, toner, glue, spare parts, and repairs. And you haven't eliminated storage because you need to stick the supplies somewhere.
Now, do you think any chain store is going to plop down all the cash for all that, plus take the time to train people on this machine? (Yes, I know what the article said, but it almost never works out to be that easy.) Plus, you probably have some fun little insurance add-ons based on the machine, OSHA requirements, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Is it revolutionary? Sort of. The Xerox Docutech 6115 can do most of this already. (It can't cut pages.) Yes, it's all in one machine. Yes, it's probably cheaper then buying the equivalent set-up in several machines. But it is a revolutionary idea that will tilt the publishing industry head over heels? No.
You want cheaper paperbacks? Go to a used bookstore.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Um, because of portability? I can open .pdfs with no problem on Macs, PCs, and Linux boxes. And I can print them on any of the linked copiers/printers in the store. That, and more people can understand and use Acrobat and get what they want rather then accidentally sending the .ps file text straight to the printer and get 17 pages of crap.
.kdf, and then convert the .kdf into a .pdf which looks exactly the same.
And why bother "exporting" from MS Word? At Kinko's (plug, plug), I can send it directly to a File Prep tool, which turns it into a
Or, funnily enough, I could just print the damn Word file straight out without going through all those steps... (why the hell would anyone export an MS Word file to anything if it will print out just fine from there? 'splain that to me...)
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
It already exists. It's called Limewire. Text files are only one thing you can choose to download. I've seen entire Star Trek novels up there. The big problem with it is that you're using someone else's formatting, which generally is really shoddy work, and you don't get anything like footnotes (a must in any Pratchett book), any real formatting, etc. Basic .txt files. But if you can't find it anywhere else.... (or you don't care what it looks like.)
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Cut? No. At least not with the 6115. For that, you want something like the machine cutter we have, which can be set to pretty much any cutting length with an accuracy of 0.01 inches.
.pdf and run it again as needed, assuming that you didn't do something dense like delete it once it was sent to the machine (which happens all the bloody time).
The 6115 can bind, but tape bind only, and occassionally the stupid thing will be off on one copy in a long run so you end up with an inch of sticky metallic tape hanging off the edge of the book. If you're really lucky, it won't jam up anything else. Luckily you can really easily re-send the
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Yeah, that would be nice, but why do you need to spend 30 grand to do that? Take that 30 grand, stick it in a bank, let it earn interest and go to a copy shop like Kinko's (or if you're desperate, Staples) and do it there. A Xerox Docutech 6115 workstation can scan paper, or use computer files. You can set the size, color, and type of paper you want to use, tell it how you want it printed, and if you don't want it tape bound (the only type of binding the 6115 can do), they have other types available at the store (coil, comb, velo).
.pdf, you're set, and you've 'saved' 30 grand.
If it's a file that can be coverted to a
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
You can pretty much do this already. If you have the text of the book as practically any kind of file, it can be easily converted to a .pdf and run practically however you need it on a Xerox Docutech 6115. It cannot do the stitch binding of hardcover books, but so what? Most copy centers (oh, and btw, Staples reeks as a copy center) can't do them either. If you want hardcover stitching, go to a book-binder.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
If they don't have the license or authority to print the books, then it won't. If I have one of these machines, I can't print copies of Stephen King's "Dreamcatchers" unless I have permission from the holder of the copyright. Since they are unlikely to give it to me....
Now, I tend to think that one other reason why this won't eliminate bookstores is the simple fact that even though you can print out public domain books (like, say Dumas' "Three Musketeers") on it, you tend to get a better quality (and probably physically smaller) copy at a bookstore. Also, hard-cover. I don't think this machine can do those. And I really doubt that it can do stamped covers, print on the binding, etc.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
$0.03 a page? Umm, something on the order of 10,000+ pages... I think. Maybe more. That's a big point... small book runs at Kinko's are not "cost effective" in terms of standard soft-cover book prices.
But compared to laying out 30 grand for a machine like this, plus toner, ink, parts, and repair costs, it is probably less worth it to buy one of these machines.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Mmmmmmmm...............doughnuts. Is there anything they can't do?
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
For the same reason the ANX is now implementing IPSec to use the public internet instead of using its own dedicated network. IT'S EXPENSIVE!
It is a pain and also expensive for the libraries to keep up with the latest version of all the new releases and buy and keep a copy of them in the library.
Here is the current journal situation: now almost all the journals available in pdf format through our school library (Uni. of California). You can search and print out the articles you are interested.
If they can print out books or book chapters on demand for the researchers, that will be much easier for them to a certain extend:
- They don't need to keep a hard copy of each book at each campus (UC system has bunch of campuses with each of them having big libraries). Keep digital copies of them in a main database and print the ones that are requested.
- it takes less physical space.
- It is cheaper for publishers too so the licensing fees for the universities will go down too.
Also, in the immediate future, publishers will likely only want to pay to digitise their bestsellers, not educational or special interest texts. But have a look on the ebooks usenet groups, and there are plenty of titles out there if you have a PC setup and aren't not that fussed about copyright - and remember, we're now talking about the impoverished here, where we're trying to educate people up to the stage where they do have the leisure and luxury to care about abstract issues like copyright.
I think you may have this backwards; the real economic benefit to publishers comes when they can do it the other way around.
A title with a huge run (in the hundreds of thousands) makes money at a resonable retail price. Publishers who can only hope to sell thousands (or hundreds, or dozens, even) of titles either make no profit or are forced to charge outrageous prices on their titles (or, often, both). Fewer units sold = more money per unit to cover the fixed costs of publication. Under the current system, the large-run mass-market books make money, while the small-run sleepers don't. Mass-market paberback titles are so cheap per unit to produce that the publishers will not even pay to have the books shipped back and re-processed. Retailers instead tear off the front cover and toss the book in the garbage/recycle bin.
With the current process for printing and selling books at a profit firmly established, don't expect publishers to move their most bankable commodities to a new, experimental technology. Rather, look for small publishers, self-publishers, and marginalized titles from the big guys to show up first on the POD machines. Only if this proves to be a widely-implemented standard will you see the bestsellers show up in this format.
DISCLAIMER! I am not a publishing professional. All of the following is information I remember (or misremember) from casual research. I may be WRONG!
As far as I understand this (at least in the US) publishers have a big impetus to let titles go out of print. An "in print" title is considered as asset and is therefor subject to (for lack of a better term) an intellectual property tax. However, if the title is allowed to go out of print, then the IP reverts to the author, freeing the publisher from the tax liability.
This practice seems to explain why a lot of mass market fiction that was wildly popular a few years ago is now completely unavailable. The publisher prints a single, massive run and is done. I'm under the impression that a lot of the smaller genre publishers (TOR, etc.) do this pretty frequently.
Mmmmm instant customisable dead-tree edition pr0n.
Just what the doctor ordered....
In Hamburg,Germany a publisher runs a machine that works in the same way.
If you want your book printed by them, you can pay a small fee (around $300,I think), then your Book gets saved in their database and gets an ISBN and is included in the book catalogs. You can freely choose the price for your book and the publisher gets the printing cost + %20.
It works for books, like cafepress does for t-shirts.
Jan
Go pick up a sheet now and compare it to the paper in a book - I might just be hopelessly anal, but I think a better grade paper makes for a better product overall, especially since some of these books might have color pictures in them :)
On the contrary, your point proves there is a need for a machine like this! I think the value is in that you don't need to keep all the inventory of the popular books. Barnes and Noble or any other large bookstore needs to keep a large volume of "popular" books in order to satisfy demand, but its hard to forecast accurately to keep all customers happy. You overstock and then have to sell books at a huge discount. When Oprah goes on TV and raves about a book there is a quick and great demand for this before-unknown book that the lcoal B&N only has a copy or two on the bookshelves. A machine such as this corrects the problem by allowing it to print all it wants and none it doesn't.
What a grand idea!
Of course, this is even more useful to areas where shipping books is difficult or takes longer. It also helps the environment because less trucks carrying books will be on the road. Less trees to cut down to print books that were just overstocked and collect dust. Need I go on?
By the way, Business 2.0 had an article about this in last month's issue.
The Book-on-Demand idea is one of the things Don has put forth as machines that are small and affordable enough for homeowners and small businesses to use to make money. (See www.tinaja.com.)Other ideas he has put forth for cottage industry use is Santa Claus machines: A machine that will take a CAD drawing and churn out all different kinds of items to sell. Common examples are sign cutters and embroidery machines, but I've seen people start small businesses using laser cutters and high-pressure water jet cutters.
Oh sure... Every kid out there is going to cough up $30,000 dollars for thier own PerfectBook machine so they can pirate the latest Grisham novel from Gnutella.
If anything, publishers should love this means of distribution considering it taps into an impulse buying market while lowering inventory costs.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Think about it. I write a book. I want people to read it. I can send it to a publisher and get a crappy, barely better than a recording contract, book deal. They control all aspects of the book's dissemination. How many copies, where it goes, who gets paid of to give it a positive review.
Or, I invest a few G's in my own website, and take orders for my book which can be sent to the B&N's printer to be bound. B&N, or whomever, can add a surcharge to cover their costs. I still make as much money (much higher margins for the writer) and the bookstore makes thiers.
now, to perfect this model, every Library has one of these. To buy a book (sans cover art) you select from the catalog, the librarian processes your order, the document is printed. You get charged a fee for the content, and a fee for the supplies.
What is key is that it remains an Open system, where anyone can generate content for the printer. If Simon&Schuster et al. buy thier way into exclusive use, it would not be too different from the present state of affairs.
- Dan I.
- Cold fusion
- A pill that instantly sobers you up.
- Removing material from an asteroid for commercial use.
- A legal system that makes sense to anyone but lawyers.
Well ok, not the last one. To make money these would have to be things that might actually happen."How more intelligent people would be?"
Do I really need to say anything about this? DUH!
Just because you live next to a library are you automatically more intelligent? Just because you can, doesn't mean you do. And even if you do, just reading more doesn't make you more intelligent. Take your average polititian for an example. Well read. Dumb as dirt.
My name fits again.
Technological advances, in general, increase the profitability of any business. Even if the technology results in fewer short term jobs, it increases the wealth and productivity of the business and ultimately results in MORE money in the market. Those bookstores who do not embrace this new technology obviously will stand to lose lots of money in the long run. Besides, the point of the machine is to provide on-sight specialty book printing. I think it would be highly useful for quickly creating out-of-print or hard to find books.
This can be great for remote location or war recovering areas to bring back the library and help the education system get on track.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Project Gutenberg has been around since 1971, and is considered to be an open source electronic library.
We all understand the benefits of an lcd-based ebook, and of coursethe benefits of print-on-demand machines like this one. What I'm waiting for is a device which will combine the two: a book of Xerox's Gyricon or e-Ink from MIT. Both of these technologies will, eventually, be able to reproduce high resolution text on demand with virtually no power usage except when the text is being changed and very little cost. For us high school students, something like this would be a godsend. The weight of the textbooks I always carry on my back exceeds 20 pounds. Imagine all of that in a 6 oz 8 1/2 x 11 inch hardbound book. Hell, with the right technology, you could even watch movies on it.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Wouldn't this eliminate bookstores? Rather than keeping items in stock and having to deal with inventory, etc., a bookstore may just contain this machine. Or "bookstores" may be a thing of the past.
o
...it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes Wait, yes. But it seems that it will be a rather short one.
o
I disagree about the publishers. If they can be convinced that this can be done and that they will actually have less loss due to theft or copyright infringement then they'll be 100% for it. This doesn't require investment by the publishers. It requires investment by the distributor (bookstore, printing kiosk, library, or whatever). The publisher already has all of his titles in the proper form for this. He puts them in electronic form before the book is printed. It saves him from the hassle of contracting and paying for shipping, from buying and maintaining presses or contracting with the actual printers, and allows him to have more books under contract since he doesn't have to do those things. The revolutionary thing about this is that potentially every book in existance will be available from your local bookstore. All it will take is one person with access to a copy that cares enough to make sure that it is digitised.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
I know it's not exactly the same but there was something simlar being advertised over at Microsoft's place. You could buy chapters from various Microsoft Press books and tie them all into a custom book.I never tried it so I don't know exactly how it works though...Anyone with more info?
There is no such thing as 'world peace'.
Think of what that would do to stores like Barnes and Noble and Borders which cater to a large browsing public. It is one thing to sell only books on demand if all of your customers know what book they want to buy. But if your customers want to peruse your shelves for hours while sucking down Starbucks, an in house press is not for you.
Also, think of what it will do to the romance genre, many of which books are sold by virtue of the bodice-ripping Fabio artwork on the cover.
"I drank what?" - Socrates
I don't know many other people out there would rather have paper in their hands, rather than a laptop, or desktop to read from... but to have HOWTOs available in a nice printed form as fast as they can be updated... that would be pretty kewl.
I'll add a sig just as soon as I clean up this room...
Nitpicking, of course, but TorC is in New Mexico, not Nevada. :)
Ok, we have the PDF.
... ?
And The E Paper...
Why the hell would I be travellig with a 250 pages book wheen I can have it all on a 1 sheet, B/W , possibly with animations
Now , you answer, and tell me about this Book making machine (nice trick, BTW)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
While self-styled "audiophiles" may argue about the fidelity of analog vs. digital recording...
I never mentioned audio quality. To %99.999999 of listeners, they sound practically the same. In fact, most people's ears prefer CDs (even mine). The point I was trying to make in all this was in the rush to digitize everything, the pleasure in owning an object has been forgotten. I don't buy LPs because they sound better on my POS Radio Shack turntable. I buy them because when I own a record, I actually own something. A big, shiny, black vinyl thing. You can use all the extra real estate on a 12" jacket to make art you could never make on a little CD J-card. You can include posters and catalogs. And don't even get me started on choices for artists:10"s, 7"s, 12"s, 5"s, they all play on a turntable, and you can package them however you want, unlike CDs. I am not a "self-styled 'audiophile'" (I like punk rock). I just enjoy the feeling of owning something irreplacable.
Same thing goes for books. They look cool, they smell cool, they have different features, and jackets. Unless, of course, they're paperbacks. There's nothing wrong with them. I've got a bunch of those too. Those are great for when you just want the bits, but more often than not, I'll buy media for the atoms.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
What I got from the article is that it does do hardcover. It doesn't matter anyway, because with hardcover books, the author usually has a lot of input into the layout of the book, a la McSweeney's. Also, publishers often make harcover books in unique aspect ratios, materials, endplates, color plates inside, edging styles, bleeds, etc, etc. I could see this replacing paperbacks maybe, but this will do to good quality harcovers what CDs did to LPs: make elitists out of real readers.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Did you even read the article? Why do you think in such black and white terms? Here is the ideal situation: No warehousing, no distribution (save electronically), no wastage. Print enough copies to stock 1xAs many bookstores as you have. If a copy is *hot* then you have the staff make up 50 first thing in the morning (based on the previous days sales perhaps. What this machine gives a retailer is TOTAL flexability. As far as the covers selling the books, well you still can go and browse the covers the same as before... And if there is still a market for the must have Hardback book people, well let them PAY for it. I read 2-3 books a week, so I can only afford paperbacks, and the article says that paperbacks could DECREASE in price by 20%. Throw in a way to trade them in for a discount on your next book and I would be in heaven! You would'nt recognize revolutionary if Paul Revere bit you on the ass.
Do a google search before posting.
Some thoughts, which have been mentioned elsewhere:
From the sounds of it, much of this technology isn't new. Fifteen years ago, a former employeer had a copier that would copy, insert dividers, collate and hot bind documents. Don Lancaster, in a series of Computer Shopper (back when it was a newsprint by Patch Pub) talked about self publishing with laser printers and hot glue binders at least 20 years ago.
Some problems:
1. Quality - The trouble with glue bindings is they suck. The glue craks, pages come out, and you can't lay the book flat. They were fine for our reports that got read and then stored. If you layed one down, the pages would flop shut, and after 10 or so people used it some of the pages would start seperating from the glue background. Even if you got a $30 traditional book for $24, would you be willing to put up with it falling apart after some use?
2. Cost - even if you shave $5 off of the actual printing costs, the author still wants some money, so you'd still have to pay for the file. So the difference between a "real" and instant book's price may not be all that great, especially for larger ones. Sure you save warehousing costs, but now the print shop needs to price to recover the machines cost. While it may help unknown and non-mainstream authors, don't count on it to cut textbook costs. Small print runs still me smaller royalties or higher per book payments - guess which professors will chose? As a side note, my school produced case books of readings for classes uses this type of binding (photocopy/hot glue). Thos ebooks were often double the price of a textbook - because the royalties on the articles and cases had to be paid.
3. Buying habits - Think about how you buy books - you wander a stack, where similar themed books are placed on shelves. If a title interests you , you may look at it and possibly buy it, even if it wasn't the one you were looking for. Impulse buying is part of the book sales model - and instant printing takes that away (unless you put one of each title up, but now you have printing and warehousing costs. If booksellers could make as much money by having a drive up window and auto-pickers to get stock to the window, they'r have done that, if only to cut costs. Heck, they could even put the starbucks machine by the drive up and serve (with suitable warnibgs about temperature) coffe and a scone for the yuppies. My guess is they still want you to come into the stores, which is why they have plenty of ailse and Starbucks.
My guess is this will be useful for companies that need to do manuals, handbooks, etc., because they can save on printing costs (of course, Kinko's is already tackling that market). Self published authors will also be able to produce more professional looking books. If this machine can lower teh total cost of production (vs Kinko's current method), you'll see quick copy places adopting them. If not, it will be yet another "new" idea that's been around a while.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
All we need now is something that'll scan books that easily... And an efficient, distributed search engine to find them on - Novelster?
Did I not say luxury items(such as antiques) or I am talking to myself. Also, have you ever heard of inflation(you know, where the prices for the same goods and services go up.) Xerox has a limited number of consumer base(schools, businesses, etc.) and really has no competion has no competition so it can afford to keep the prices high. Also, the Xerox machine in 2001 is much cheaper then 1985 due to inflation. Assuming 3% inflation, that $15,000 machine in 1985 would theoretically cost $24,070.60 with inflation at todays prices but it only costs $15,000, $9,070.60 cheaper then the 1985 version or 37.7% less, even though it has the same price tage on it.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Depends on the licensing. If they only make money on the machine, they are going to keep the prices reasonably high enough that businesses can still afford them but they still make a hell of a profit. If they make a fraction of the money on each book printed on their machine, they are going to keep prices low so everybody can buy one so more books get printed and they make more money in the long-run. Also, if they decide to do the first, they may actually keep prices low in order to stimulate growth in the business so that the long-run profit maximizing price is actually lower(with a higher amount of profits) than they can currently sale it for. Xerox already has a developed business and doesn't need to do this because every one who really needs or wants one already has one... Knight blocks Bishop in check of King.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
$30,000 dollars today is $5,500 in 4 years. Just wait and Mom & Pop will be able to afford this, someday.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
This is different. CD-Rs don't last as long as pressed CDs nor do they have as pretty labels(although you could probably get a label printer) and their is no one centralized point to make sure that the companies that who own the data on the CDs get the money that is coming to them. Books, on the other hand, can be more easily forced by law and regulation to comply and to give money where do(although pirating will still happen.) This might become a major problem in third world countries such as India where the laws are different and people could easily manufacture a few million of these books and not pay the publishers a cent. The book printing on demand is a cool idea but still is slower then prepressed books and would not be very useful for popular books. I doubt these machines will become wide-spread for quite some time but we'll wait and see.
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Just because a bunch of people believe or do something stupid, doesn't make it any less stupid.
Book prices from a machine like this will probably be significantly higher than at your everyday bookstore, especially if one is at the store. Most books that can be found at the library are printed on cheap recycled paper that's of slightly better quality than newspaper. Regular paper from an office supply store for printers/copiers/etc are more expensive in comparison. Not to mention, having the convenience of a book-on-demand from a shop, plus costs of labor in having a clerk do that upon request (and keep ink, toner filled) will drive the cost of your book up quickly.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
the problem with your theory is that you are assuming that this will be a consumer driven product, it wont be... it will be an industry driven product (the printer, not the books)
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
and just how long do you think this process will take? believe me you will STILL be waiting
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
not on something like that it wont... unless you are buying used (and then it will be worn out).
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Soon microsoft will be up in arms about people pirating their "How To Use windows95" and "CD-ROM Installation Guide" handbooks. Somehow... I actually believe that myself.
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Sig
VolumeOne in Chicago has been in this business since 1997
Fascinating link, and yes, I would agree, it looks like they are doing pretty much the same thing. BUT, it looks like they have not gone anywhere with it. Their web site mentions "stores opening in 1998", and my calendar says 2001. I checked the Chicago phone books from 1998 and 2001 and there is no listing for "Volume One". They mention a store being built (once again 1998) on Broadway in Chicago, and I can't recall ever seeing it and there is no address listed. It sure looks like they have not updated their site in 4 years, not a good sign for a new business.
I am quite glad you posted, as it surely shows this is no new concept. I guess it shows there are clearly major barriers to entering this business, as it seems a very good idea and is obviously having problems (perhaps technical, financial, legal, or "D. All of the Above"). It would be real interesting to hear what is causing the problem.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
This is another example of shipping generics over specifics being VASTLY more environmentally friendly.
It is not your motorcar, your transatlantic flights, star wars, or the French that are going to kill the planet. Its the vast efforts and energy consumption used in transporting infinite variations of crap around the globe.
One of these babies in every bookshop in the world and you just have paper, toner, and staple trucks roaming the globe - not a truck each for every damn publishing house. Kinda like digital movies! stop shipping the atoms - ship the bits!
If only they follow it up with the all-in-one-plastic-crapolajet we can stop all transport of junk! Thus saving all that CO2 that kyoto gets wound up about (whoever the hell HE is!)
VolumeOne in Chicago has been in this business since 1997. I think some major publishing houses were looking at it too.
Sure it sounds like a great idea... I just don't see it becoming widespread. The traditional publishing industry has us figured out pretty well, and most of the profit to be made is in current books that are selling a lot.
Machines such as these would fill a great niche market to print those few out-of-print books that people want from time to time. The economies of large-scale printing are what the industry has come to depend on for profits. These individual books will be either lower quality or higher price, or both, and are not going to be a good source of income for your local bookstore.
And that is assuming that every book is already in digital format (anybody know what percentage of older books are?)...
Provided this device allows for different paper stocks, colors and hardcovers this is the realisation of one of my long time dreams; Limited or unique books of art, poetry or any other creative outlet that translates into print.
You could even have Premiere dump the frames from a movie to imagefiles, and make a flip-over aninmation version of your favourite film. Add a walkman and you can toss your portable dvd-player in the bin..
-By attempting the impossible we can achieve the absurd..
People like the feel of turning a page
There is currently no display technology that matches the ease of reading paper
There is currently no "search" technology that matches flipping through a book for the passage you're looking for
You can't get a copy of David Gerrold's "A Matter for Men" in eBook format (or any other good classic sci-fi novel, grok that?)
They cost $300 bucks (I can get 300 books from Half Price books for that much money, and sell them back for about $80)
The Dopester
"Yes, I'm a Karma Whore, but I'm doing it to pay my way through school."
Of course if electronic books were more popular some of these issues would go away (cost for one), but none of the major publishers seem interested in taking the leap at this point. In the meantime ebooks will remain a curiosity for most of the world. The average person isn't interested in paying more money for a less-convenient way to read a book.
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"It's time for some premeditated self-defense."
Just like most existing laser printers it could be configured to accept a huge variety of fonts provided by the publisher. The necessary fonts could even be included in the book's files.
standard copier paper is usually considerably worse...
Within a certain range, I am sure that the machine could be configured to use different weights and finishes.
don't forget the rest of the experience you would thus forgo...
On the contrary, bookstores would no longer have to stock multiple copies of individual books so they could have thousands and thousands of singly printed books available for the browsing! Think of how much of a bookstores shelfspace is dominated by 15-20 copies of the new Danielle Steel novel, etc.
Also, by using the machine overnight to print multiple copies of popular books, waiting times could be reduced dramatically. This machine seems to be an incredibly good idea, and I believe has very few drawbacks. It would enhance the typical browsing experience, cut costs to the publishers, enhance selection, allow greater access for new authors, and (presumably) save resources as well.
*most people never really think about the consequences*
If I choose lowest grade paper and simple binding without colour cover etc, I get the book cheaper, ideal for manuals etc. If I choose highest quality paper and print type as well as full colour cover and the extra optional illustrations, I pay more, ideal for reading in a comfy chair, putting on the shelf and keeping for 'ever'.
The author could get paid based on total sales or extra for better printings etc.
The publisher would really become a database service and the quality of the publishers editors etc will rapidly become quite important.
The ability to browse a book could still be maintained by having a book viewer/s available in store. That would allow brief pre reading for a set time per book download(with a very small amout paid back to the publisher/author for each 5 minute preread etc. Alternatively only a fraction of the book could be available that way.
Maybe the book store could choose the method of previewing or have none at all. A book store with lots of space and comfy chairs and coffee shop etc would probably not mind paying out 50 cents an hour for browser traffic if they also gain income from the non book activities. A book store that used the fractional method could be one that had high throughput and little time to browse, like one on a railway platform etc, the problem then being speed of printing.
My only other concern is Books with mass pictures etc could take forever to print, I can just imagine what the illustrated history of WW2 would cost in time etc to print compared to the (currently) same cost, Tom Clancy all print hardcover.
The advertisers could also be required to pay more for having wide area readable adds etc. Local advertisers then are not penalised by having to pay for a reader in Uraguay seeing their add for "betty's hair salon"
The purchaser could also ask for the paper without adds at a price or a cut down paper without all the fluffy sections like 'weekend', 'motoring', 'style' etc.
Unfortunately I see a problem with the magazine issue as well, namely the time taken to print. I will occasionally pick up a bulletin or time magazine but it is a spur of the moment purchase. If I had to stand there for 5+ minutes waiting for it to print then no way.
The news stand could use it as a inventory restocking device though. Have one or two prints of the popular mags on the stand, if they sell then automatically print another. At most this means there will be only 1 or 2 extras.
This is funny - yet again, slashdot.org provides us with yesterday's news. Heck, 10 year old news!
Judge for yourself: http://www.docutech2000.xerox.com/index.html
if there was a way to make custom audio CD, the whole audio industry would change. You'll get those CD making machine in little shop, and you'll be able to buy whatever music you want, cheap.
Wow, this kind of device would change everything. No more out-of-stock. No more return. Build on demand. I bet that the recording industry is impatiently waiting for that. Sweet, how technology change the way business work.
</sarcastic>
Cheers,
--fred
Another possibility would be for faster distribution of overseas printings. For example, I try to follow the Dr. Who original novles published by BBC; these are typically printed and released in EU about a month or two before they get to the stands. In addition, the cost in the States tends to be higher due to the cost of import. I'd love to have a slightly cheaper-made copy that was in my hands earlier, as long as everyone in the chain of distribution was getting the appropriate amount of reward.
But I think even more so, this device could empower more would-be-but-neglicted authors to get their works out in the public; I'm not about to read a 500 page work on-line, but if I could just tell the owner of this machine to print out something from a URL in book form, there's a much more likely chance that I would read that instead.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
The way I see this being important is that it lets you not need a huge warehouse and a big store to offer a large selection. This means that a little storefront bookstore can offer as many books as a huge chain store. Of course, this doesn't let you browse the books that aren't on the shelves, but you should at least be able to look through a list of titles.
Starting a bussiness around it is tough though, because of the copyright lock-up on most published works. Although, I thought of offering Project Gutenberg books via this method.
I doubt there is enough money in it.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
They are making an unforgivable marketing mistake: for the sake of "partnering" with publishers, they are stunting the size of their own market. All the failed e-books, the tepid reception to Microsoft Reader, and a huge untapped opportunity for Adobe all can be attributed to the fact they did not emphasize free perfectly legal and legitimate content.
Microsoft links (rather shyly, burying the link under all the paid content links) to the University of Virginia Library Etext Center but this source has only 1600 books. That's less than 1% of well-known books, and a tiny fraction of all books that have no copyright coverage. There is a lot of free (speech, beer) text out there but very little is formatted for an acceptable online (or print-on-demand) reading experience. And e-books take up a tiny fraction of the space of MP3s.
If you really want to throw a bomb into the IPR world, get the Library of Congress or whatever your nation's corresponding institution is to provide a high-quality e-text of all materials that are no longer under copyright.
I wrote parts of this stuff
"Books on demand" sounds wonderful until you realize that this kind of technology is already offering publishers new ways to screw authors.
Andrew Malcom is an author (and all-round brave and persistent guy) who has been taking on dodgy academic publishing practices for years.
Read his article for the full story.
No, it's not. Do the math: that three cents a page, which is generous, by the way, costs you $15 US for a 500 page book. Mass-producing the same book and shipping it to your local bookstore, it's going to cost you between $5 and $10. If the cost is four cents a page, it's $20 for the same book.
My point is, you're paying the SAME shipping fees for the materials, the only thing that changes is the point of assembly. And mass-production on dedicated high-speed presses is going to be much much cheaper than one-off production in the local book machine. There is wasteage in the distribution and sale of printed books, granted, and more middlemen, but that's the only thing that makes it even close. That $8 paperback they sell in the store only cost maybe a buck to print.
Plus, the quality of both paper and printing and binding are likely to be inferior to the mass-produced version.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
When I go to a bookstore, I go for the experience of poking around and finding the book I want. The ability to be able to check out and access the entire book is vital for me when I want to consider which book to buy.
If you replace this with kiosks in bookstores containing minimal information, then quite honestly I'd might as well buy from amazon.
I do think this is a good thing, though, since it would mean only one copy of each book could be on the shelves. Then I would simply take a look at it, decide to buy, take it to the checkout, and they'd punch the button and give me a nice clean fresh copy. Cool; I often hesitate to buy books because they are in poor condition in the store, having been pawed by hundreds of hands.
Before really loving this technology, though, remember it means the death of $5 remaindered hardcover books. Also, I wonder how this works with the increasing use of glossy paper and colour printing in today's books; look at the computer section of any bookstore and you'll see a few dozen books on Adobe Photoshop that are printed this way. That's bound to dramatically increase the cost of this machine, or limit its ability to serve stores and customers.
D
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Ummm cince you missed it...
:-)
:-) gotta love postscript!
Input file in one end - get book out of other end.
the D in DN stands for Duplexing. For a total of 8000.00 plus toner cartridges and paper and staples/binding supplies you press the print button and go and pick up books at the other end (if you want to run the binding tape down the edge for a better look you can, but you dont have to)
I pay out the ass as you say, at the tune of 0.5 cents per page (both sides printed) which is pretty expensive compared to the 0.3 cents per page the offset printer in town pays for his ink. (His ass is smaller than mine... Less doughnuts in the morning!
So your point is? other than not being hardcover and a wierd size as books are (book printing at these bizzare sizes wastes more paper than all offices combined!) I have a working solution.. and far cheaper than anything else I have seen.
Oh, and it's 100% linux compatable
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
The last Danielle Steele book may not have been Shakespeare--but it was a Danielle Steele book. People who want to read Danielle Steele books know who she is, and that she writes books of the quality that they want to read. But, people who have never read a Danielle Steele book and have never heard of her can look at the blurb, think, "Hmm, that's the kind of story I like to read. If it's been professionally published, then it's been given a professional proofreading, and it must have been at least good enough for a publisher to want to publish. I think I'll give it a shot." That is to say, they can know from the fact that it has been pro-published, the cover of the book should be accurately representative of the writing/editing/proofing quality within.
Not all published stuff has to be good. Not all published stuff even is good. But there is at least someone to weed out the stuff that goes into the slushpile.
I mean, look at fanfic groups on the Internet sometime. See how long you have to look before you find something that is actually worth reading, even if you like that sort of thing.
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
This machine, in one fell swoop, will let publishing houses stop having to warehouse and print so many titles. Costs will go way down, profit margins will go up, and perhaps more midlist authors will start being published again.
As for piracy . . . I think some people are only skimming the article. This is a big, complicated, mechanical, $30,000 machine--it's not likely to be the sort of machine that the "casual pirate" is going to be able to buy. If you're talking about the overseas printers that churn out physical pirate books--well, they're doing that now, with regular printing presses. The lack of a machine like this won't stop them either.
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Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I suppose a bookstore clerk could try to defeat whatever auditing system is built into the machine and either run off ten free copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover or convert the book image to an unlocked PDF ... but if the machine's designers put a little effort into tamper-proofing the equipment, I don't think the publishers would lose much to this kind of copyright violation.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
This would have been news 3 years ago. Actually, it was news 3 years ago. For instance, Wired had a article on this on June 16, 1998. Xerox and IBM have had machines to do this job for ages, so I don't see why this is big news now. I recall that Borders was planning to offer this service in their bookstores (obviously, this did not happen).
... 3 years ago. I'm still waiting.
There are still unresolved issues. For example, convincing numerous copyright holders to allow on-demand printing. A former colleague worked on a startup with similar goals, but never got past the legal and funding issues. If even Borders could not pull this off, who could? There is also the problem of contracts. Many publishers' agreements with authors have clauses that depend on when the book goes out of print. In electronic publishing, the title never goes out of print.
I would love to see books-on-demand really take off
Why do I get the feeling that the majority of the books that come out of this machine will be custom porno mags?
And, truth be told, if they can steal one book, they'll probably steal the whole database full of books.
Ever heard of napster?
No more stock doing nothing. Ten books sold, ten books printed. 1000 trees saved...
And books will be cheaper because of reduced transport costs.
But the really grand thing in it is it'll give new writers a chance. How many publishers are willing to risk to press 10,000 books if they're not sure the book's going to succeed? Now they can just deliver the electronic version, and if it'll succeed, cool. If it doesn't, less money wasted.
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... sometimes I fly with the white swan to my Liffey home.
Does anyone know of a machine that will do the exact opposite? If you are like me, then you have way too many bookshelves filled with technical reference books, many of them 10 years old. But you can't bare to throw away that ancient PC Interrupts book least someday you have an arcane question about the PC BOIS call while working on a Virtual PC emulator. I agree that reading paper copies is preferable most of the time, but books that I'm going to access once every 5 years would be better off as digital. These books take of a ton of space and space is expensive in San Francisco.
I want a machine that can remove the bindings from books and scan in both sides of the pages as a big stack of papers. Then I'm left with a digital copy, which fits into one millionth of the space, and some a lot of firewood. Anyone have a suggestion on the best way to remove book bindings? Are there service companies out there that will do this? It's not going to be worthwhile if it takes a lot of time or money per book, but I'd be willing to pay a dollar or two.
-- Virtual Windows Project
Like someone said above (now I've lost the cid, of course...), why not have a bookstore that keeps *one* copy of each book, maybe more for Grisham etc., and prints out a copy when you bring the `demo' up front. Kind of like renting a movie.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Who the hell is going to transmit already-rasterised pages?! That would limit even DVDs to 470 pages. I don't even want to *think* about transmission times.
There's a *reason* printers use PostScript instead of enormous TIFFs. Well, several, actually. But anyhoo.
If not PostScript, what *do* large imaging houses use? I assume they convert from PostScript in the first place...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Who wants to produce copyrighted works on this?!
Frankly, Net-HOWTO would look a lot prettier in a book than in the ubiquitous TRB (three ring binder)...
There are free books *everywhere*. Gutenberg. linuxdoc. Graduate theses. The latter two are things you wouldn't be able to get at Borders in any case...
Now someone just has to start making Project Gutenberg's ASCII files into TeX versions. Mmm, TeX.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
All right! Yes!
I ordered Barefoot Gen from Amazon's Used search, and when they got back to me (two months later) they wanted seventy bucks for a book that had drawn a ten- or fifteen-dollar cover price in the eighties.
Plus, with this, I'd get a brand spanking new copy. Mmm, spanking.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Uh, ever heard of pipelining? There's no reason the machine can't print and staple while it glues. Yes, the *latency* is seven minutes, but that says nothing about the throughput.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Interesting note: copyright reverts to the author if the book goes out of print. With little-to-no effort, Print-on-Demand keeps books `in print'. So copyright effectively never reverts to the authors now.
Well, shee-it.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I rest my case.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Remaindered hardcovers? Five bucks? Explain, man, explain!
And here I've been saving up to buy from Amazon, the chump that I am...
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Absolutely right; laser paper is 20- or 24-pound stock. I was just saying that if your documentation is big and unwieldy, and you don't want a book, just a binder for miscellaneous stuff, then duplexing can help.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Why does everyone think that PDF is the start-all, be-all and end-all of document transport?
PDF is (basically) compressed, encoded PostScript with a few bells and whistles (hypertext, (rarely-used) forms and a prettier viewer than GSView) -- it doesn't really do anything that PostScript doesn't.
And if you're thinking of exporting from MSWord, be ready for some piss-poor-looking documentation.
The printing industry already went through this business about portable formats in the late seventies and early eighties. SGML, TeX and PostScript all came out of that.
PDF is an obscured format. In an ideal world, everyone would write in TeX/LaTeX and distribute in DVI...
... but I'm really reaching now. Unless you count almost every MS/PhD student who's written a thesis for a math/physics/CS/engineering department in the last fifteen years.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
While self-styled "audiophiles" may argue about the fidelity of analog vs. digital recording, how does a self-styled "real reader" argue that I'm not getting the full impact of the text of (to pick the used paperback I finished re-rereading for the nth time last night) A Wizard of Earthsea because it's printed in paperback?
A "real reader" loves the work. An elitist who buys books by the yard to make an impressive decoration for his living room may care more about hardcover vs. paperback.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"Well, I don't think there is much value in making a machine that can print out the same titles that you can get from your local B&N (or online, for that matter)"
That's not the point. The *point* is that your local B&N, does not have to order physical copies of books brought in truck loads. They just have one (or several) of these machines, and create a book just for you "on-demand". That reduces storage overhead, and risk for them, when they buy 1 Gazillion copies of _Peer_to_Peer_Will_Never_Amount_to_Anything_.
And speaking of P2P, this is yet another technology where the digital world is invading the real world and breaking down artificial barriers. First it was music. Now it's going to be books. Publishers will have to bring prices down (or, even further, might not have any reason to exist, now that the "distribution channel" is digital). Publishers, like the music industry, will (or should), move to a role of 3rd party services, all competing for the author's/artist's business, as opposed to being in positions of near absolute authority and treating authors and artists as migrant workers to be used and spit out. Decentralization is a good thing (well, at least in the case of control of information).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Thats why theres a license in the front of most books:
All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retreival system, or transmitted by any means....without written permission from the publisher.
You've never had the rights to do this with most books.
This poses as much danger to that law as, say, a photocopier. Maybe a little more. I don't forsee a bookster in anyone's future. Some of you heathens dare not read dissenting opinions anyway. =)
Slashdot something useful.
Management is not a tunable parameter.
The bookstore can keep your experience of thumbing around (which they recognize that customer's love), while still improving their ability to sell. Imagine if they only bought a single copy of each title that they normally carry. No more in the back, no being shipped or stored. A 'browsing copy', that you can look through as much as you want, but if you buy a book, you buy one printed new.
This means that they still get to reduce stock and floorspace (how many '50 of every harry potter book' displays have we seen in the past few years?), while preserving the customer experience. You also don't have to worry about stock being damaged by people browsing- if little Billy tears a page while looking through Whorton Hears a Who, you didn't lose the sale of a 7 dollar book, you've just had minor damage to a display copy that will cause you to take it off the shelves maybe a week earlier than you would otherwise.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
> Besides been too expensive, hardcovers are just harder to read.
/science / math books are hardcover. They are not meant for "general reading" but more for "general lookup."
I don't have a problem paying for the better binding and cover. That's why you will notice a lot of reference
I have too many times "cracked" the spine of cheap paperbacks, and the pages have become dog-eared from carrying them around so much.
I'm certainly thankfull that my graphics and math books are all hardcover.
> with a hardcover, forget laying in bed or in a hammock and reading.
I agree. Softcovers have that "comfy" level.
What I see this device doing is eliminating the cross-country shipment of inventory and localizing the printing process. Maybe B&N has one of these printers per store, or one in a central store per city, county, or region. It's used strictly to restock the shelves, not for on-demand printing unless it's an older, "out of print" title. As the stock on the shelf of a certain title runs low, rather than order a new shipment or keeping a reserve stack in the back-room for each title, they simply print 5 more copies and put it on the shelf. This would eliminate a large chunk of the time and cost that goes along with the current warehousing system. And imagine what this device could do for a company like Amazon, who is being held back by these same warehousing and shipping costs.
What do you think it will take for people to move from paper based to "ebook" type devices?
Mmmmmmm. Floor pie!
The other advantage I see is that this would provide a 'standard' on digital book format.. How long until we see this 'digital files' floating around gnutella?
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Simply take scraps, newspaper and glue, compress into block form, push into a can and label "Spam" and voila, you have a meat like product.
Interestingly enough you can already do everything that this machine does, and for considerably less than the 30k price tag. Go down to your local kinkos (or any other large scale copy shop for that matter) with a PDF file of the book you want to print, or better yet send it in over the web. As long as you have copyright access to the matterials contained within they will be more than happy to Print, Cut and Bind a professional looking book for you. True not ALL kinkos (or other copy shops), have the facilities to bind your book so it looks like a paperback, but many do.
In fact this is the area where you are most likely to see these machines first, not your local book store, or small publisher. The reason is speed, at "a few minutes" per book these machines are not nearly fast enough to be used in the publishing industry, and they will most likely require a signifigant ammount of training to run. When was the last time you trusted your local book store register jock to make you latte correctly? Copy shop employees operate this type of machinery on a regular basis, so training costs would be lowered, and heck, copy shops are where this type of thing is most in demand (you can tell because that's where it happens now).
Disclaimer, I do work at Kinko's, but this isn't an ad or a Troll.
Oh, and when I've written my biography (hah!) I'll be able to get it published and give it to difficult-to-buy-for friends and family at Christmas without actually needing to include anything in there that would make it worth publishing in the first place. Sweeeeeeet.
here's the graphical description. ...basically, this just slaps a few machines together and automates a bit, but this kind of 'new' technology existed in my /high school/ six years ago and wasn't new then (actually, it was rather old). at $30k for the machine, you can expect to pay a bit more than the actual production of your book.
... hardly worth it. (math done: 3-5 cents a page, $5-10 for other materials like binding, $5-10 surcharge.)
and this machine prints ONE book at a time, making it useless for anything other than personal books (so your school is still better off with a publisher or in-house method to produce your yearbooks). I'd expect a four hundred page book to cost you roughly $25-$40
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Given that on-demand printing is reasonably expensive, machines like this might be more succesful if they produced saddle-stitched hardcover books with rigid covers. Might add a dollar or two to the price, but the books would be more valuable.
Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes, because we all know that files that are designated for printing cannot possibly be viewed by any other process. Forget about that whole Postscript language that any decent printer uses. And all the drivers that convert other printers' format to postscript.
And the network is "closed"? Come on now, you'd think people would have learned by now that any network that is open to anyone is not closed. It is extremely unlikely that they would not use the Internet for this, and also unlikely that they would use a VPN. And even if they did use a VPN, you can spoof members' VPN connections without much trouble, all it takes is one machine that is less secure than the rest.
I was about to propose a system where the publishers used a PKI to encrypt books so they'd only be unlockable with a private key, or maybe even a private key *card* (kind of like a book club card or something). But even those can be spoofed. However, if they put enough into making the system tamper resistant it might be cost-prohibitive to spoof. Kind of like the reason no one tries to counterfeit U.S. quarters: if you make the machines smart enough so they don't accept 2 cent washers instead, the system works because it's not worth it to copy them. So tamper-resistant book-club type cards might work for this system. But I bet they won't use anything that easy, so they will go out of business quickly just like all the rest of the people who try to make money off this stuff.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
That said, who thinks that anything NOT published by a Big Publisher will be available from these printers? Say, if I make my self-published book "The 100 Greatest Publishing Conspiracies of All Time" into a PDF file (or whatever format is appropriate), who's to say that I'll be allowed into the game? After all, if I can essentially "publish" my book from a PC, sending a PDF file to the Insta-Book Network (who in effect become my "publisher" without having to exercise any editorial effort or control) then why would I ever take it to one of the old "dead tree publishers"? Who would ever publish with them again? They'll fight hard to control this technology, because it could easily make them redundant.
(This assuming the technology improves to reduce the per-copy price to what is now considered acceptable for mass-market books)
Freedom: "I won't!"
You're misunderstanding the meaning of "dreck." Even someone who *wants* to read about pyramid power and astrology wants to know he's getting something that's of reasonable quality... it's at least had a token proofreading and maybe even copy editing, and so on.
If you think everyone who would self-publish meets that quality standard, you've never run/read an APAzine...
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Though won't empty the books of a bookstore, you just won't have to wait 10 days for that out-of-stock book. The main benefit of a bookstore, now, is to go in and browse. If you wanted to buy a specific book, you have on-line sellers.
Fight Spammers!
I see the application for this machine in public libraries rather than bookstores.
You should be able to go to a library and get a personal copy of any book that is out of copyright (perhaps a nominal deposit to cover cost that would be refunded if the book is returned for re-use).
No more need for inter-library loans. And no more disappointment at finding that the book in the catalogue isn't on the shelves.
Oh, and the machine's a natural for magazines and periodicals, too! Print on demand at the newsstand (returns on magazines are as bad as/worse than on books).
No e-book or .pdf file will ever be perferable until I can take it into the bog with me.
N.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
Publishers are still needed, partly for doing publicity and such to promote the book for more sales, but mostly because most readers are accustomed to having publishers act as the gatekeepers, the arbiters of quality--if something has been pro-published, they know that it's more likely to be worth reading.
By your argument the last Daniel Steel book would have been Shakespeare. I disagree. Publishers only really serve one useful purpose (in a world of digital media and zero-cost copying) and that is editing. Even that could be remedied by an Editors Union... publishers then become completely unnecessary. The 'quality' assurance should and can be very competently done by librarians, scholars and critics. THEY are even better at it because they can be assumed to be impartial (unlike the 'sony-movie-reviewer' scenario and other corruption), but trusting a publisher to tell you what is quality is ridiculous. Thats like listening to a wolf on how to tend your sheep-farm. Lets remember: Capitalists (Publishers) are interested in Profit (money) not Enlightenment (good books).
..and on the function of 'publicity' - it is useless trash. Publicity == advertising == marketing == garbage. If you let appearances on 'good morning today' influence your book reading Id suggest you may want to find a more honourable source of direction (to put it mildly). If a book is significantly important, such that you want to read it, you will hear about it through other means of critical reporting, maybe a fansite (for Sci-Fi) or a Trade Union (for manuals/technical analysis) or anywhere else.
In a world without publishers to moderate product based on 'market-demand' just imagine the array of new and compelling works that would be created. This device could liberate artists from publishers, and the public from Publisher controlled Pap-O-Matic that sells millions of 'lowest-common-denominator' trash every year because they can do 'publicity' and 'gatekeeping'.
Hey,
On the second page:
Though virtually every American book published since the late 1980s was typeset by computer and presumably exists in digital file format, the vast majority of books ever published were not and do not. While some publishers have begun to digitize their back catalogues, it's a forbiddingly expensive enterprise.
Presumably they type the books in manually. It would be easier to get a nice digital camera, put it on a tripod, point it at the desk, and get some nice OCR software. It would be easy enough to automate the system - just place the book in, hit the camera button, and it pulls down one page, then turn the page, hit the button again, and so on.
Well, maybe.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Screw that, I read constantly and I'll only buy paperbacks. Besides been too expensive, hardcovers are just harder to read. Its impossible to get confortable in any position besides sitting strait up with a hardcover, forget laying in bed or in a hammock and reading.
Plus in order to use a stack scanner on a book, wouldnt you need to cut out each individual page, or slice all the pages at once at the binding? So in order to copy the book you must destroy it. If you're selling copied books on a large scale that would work, but the average person would never copy books under those conditions.
I buy a lot of books, both new and secondhand...
one of the most frustrating things is losing an out of print book that's unlikely to ever be in print again
if this was to work, there would have to be some changes to the publishing industry, and if that's going to be half the pain in the ass that the music industry is, maybe we need to be a little more active in initiating change.
I'd love to be able to go into a store and "order" a book, maybe customised, with a certain cover from the range, in various sizes or languages.
a book copying machine is neat, but a made-to-order book system would be much neater
maybe this really needs a DVD-factor (not the encryption kind)... customisable, with extras
if it comes from a database, can the books be updated regularly?
how easy is it for an indy publisher to enter the ring?
could you sandwich books? if you wanted a series printed into one solid book, is that possible? bindings would probably limit sizes possible, but the publishing industry doesn't really allow for bundling of books outside the publishing houses deciding to
come to think of it... this in general should be making publishers pee their pants...
on a side note, I bought three books today... One that would be crap to print in this way (I'm guessing), as it's a glossy little quote book with cartoons, cute and it relies on it's looks to be readable... the other two would probably print nicely, no fuss covers, both made out of that weird plastic-covered paper, one of them smelling quite strongly of bleach (?!)
It's got potential... and like Henry Ford said...
there's a better way to do it, just find it
No chance the music or publishing industries are really going to seriously look for a better way, since some of the more useless people might lose their jobs... but that's evolution for ya...
machines on the street corner that print you up the daily paper on demand.
hasn't there been mention of this before? I remember something about being able to buy your local paper when travelling (or something like that)...
I like to do both. I read a lot of stuff in front of the computer. I also print out a lot of stuff so I can read it in a more comfortable offline setting.
I was just commenting about a device whose purpose struck me as helping us consume ink and trees at an even faster rate. It seems that with all our computerization, we consume paper/ink at a rate much higher than 20 years ago. It is just so easy to print and photocopy stuff. Think back to what it was like in the dot-matric, non-GUI, days when photocopiers were ultra expensive. I simply think this device will accellerate this trend. It's just too easy to print out something that you'll read once and throw away -- although the reading experience may be more pleasant.
I don't have any delusions of paperless. I think we'll go paperless when paperless alternatives offer all of the advantages of paper.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Yet another piece of technology to help accomplish the fabled paperless office, or paperless society.
--
"Linux is a cancer" -- Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
That's key. A couple of people have assumed that publishers would own these, but instead, booksellers like B&N or libraries would be better served with one of these.
What I'd be impressed by is if it can handle thinner paper. If I print a 100 page document on normal copy stock, it comes out as thick as a 300 page book I get at B&N. There are times when I've wanted to print out a manual or PDF, but the length was prohibitive.
Beware typoes.
It should be noted that the the main use for publishing on demand appears to be scientific and technical data, where very expensive information is to be distributed in an easily chargable form. You don't need these books very often, and the shelf cost is prohibitively high for a bookstore to keep them. Print on demand is turning out to be the answer.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Yeah, but at $30,000 it's going to be beyond the price-range of most Indy writers and zine publishers. So, if Staples gets one, you get to go there and use it, which is great, unless you're like every zine writer I know, who wait until 3 in the morning to publish, which leaves Kinko's as the only local option.
And considering that there are machines that already do practically everything that this one does... yeah, maybe not all in one, but you can take the output from one machine, get it stapled, folded, bound, trimmed, whatever at any other... it takes a little longer, sure... but having worked with several of these machines, I don't know if I want something that can do all of this in one case. It's that much more that can break down, and given what I know, it will break down. Check the warranty and repair license before you buy or lease. (Although, Xerox was giving a year of free service calls with their larger machines a while back... not sure if they are still doing that.)
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Damn, and to think I do it all the time at work. Yeah, all it takes is a stack scanner, some Xerox software, and clicking on that 'Begin' button. I can even walk away, get a Coke and wait for it to finish. Then I come back, clean up the document if it needs it, send it to Acrobat, and from there I can either use some more Xerox software to set things like tabs, covers, or funky pages up, or just send it straight to the machine to get printed automatically.
It's pretty easy, actually. But hey, why let hyperbole get in the way of facts?
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
What I think is so great about this is that it's got tons of possibilities.
Writers trying to break into the market and writers who are writing books that might only have a local interest can have maybe 20-30 books printed up at a time instead of hundreds, or have their books printed on demand.
Textbooks can possibly become cheaper and be made available on demand to students at universities. No longer will shipping be a problem, if the book is out of stock, they'll print you one! I know alot of people see digital text as the future, but as it stands, it's not really a possibility. People don't want to sit in front of a monitor that long.
Finally, I think that this means that out-of-print books don't necessarily have to become 'not available'. If someone is interested in reading a book that has gone out of print or is not in demand enough for most stores to carry it, the store can print one up!
Perhaps eventually this will even be ported to newspapers, so that I can go and buy ANY NEWSPAPER that I want and get the full content (not just the stuff that they have online) from ANY city in the United States. Right now it's really only the big cities you can buy in any city, but if I wanted to say, read the news from Truth or Consequences, Nv. I wouldn't be able to.
Anyway, this technology has some pretty cool possibilities.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
About time really. Of course, this is the kind of technology that the established hierarchy wouldn't care to see (it has, to some extent, the ability to significantly reduce publisher's clout since an independant could have as much 'shelf space' as a large house).
A few questions though... first, does the machine do different typographic styles and layouts? Does it print in the font of the author's/editor's choosing, complete with pictures, chapter icons, and so forth? All of these things are stylistically important, and are often chosen by the author for particular reasons.
Second, standard copier paper is usually considerably worse than the paper used for hardback books. It doesn't have the grain or the weight. This machine is obviously not meant for this kind of thing, but it'd be nice if it was an option.
Third, while it's a nifty thought of "wow, you could replace that huge brick & mortar bookstore with a machine the size of a photocopier!", don't forget the rest of the experience you would thus forgo - browsing the aisles, finding new and interesting books by leafing through them, meeting people, avoiding people, etc.
A complementary device for this is a high quality electronic viewer. Current display devices have nowhere close to the resolution that's given by real books, which is one of the reasons there is eyestrain with computers. Fix that, then you can browse through books electronically and then print them out for cheap (and still pay the author legitimitely) and carry them with you wherever you go.
Well, then, remind me to never hire you as a corporate executive. This machine (if the article details it truthfully, and it can be mass-produced for under $100,000) has the potential to REVOLUTIONIZE the printing industry. Can you imagine the cost of shipping millions of books? Can you imagine how much in inventory, warehousing, shipping, handling, and retail space is taken up by books? Not to mention the costs of guessing demand for a title, then having to credit hundreds of thousands of purchases to retailers when the book doesn't sell and the titles are destroyed. Or, even worse, lowballing demand and not selling thousdands of copies. Or, not selling books becasue the cost of publishing a specific title is too high to justify the niche market. Or, books that are out-of-print, and dollars go to the secondary used-book market?
With this machine, Books-a-600-million could be located in a small corner cafe, instead of the huge retail outlets they are in now. Each major, semi-major, and even indie publisher could snail-mail a DVD/CD/etc. to the retail outlet who would load them to the network. Go in to order a book, and they print it for you while you wait. Or, order from the Internet, pick it up at the shop. The only possible downsides I can see are the lack of back cover info, easily remedied with computer workstations or the Internet, however.
This is the ultimate Just In Time inventory system. Eliminates shipping and warehousing costs, gives access to a publisher's entire (digitized) catalog, and the money saved coul go back into digitizing the works. Hell, I'd even be willing to grant the publisher's an extension on copyrights if they digitized their entire catalog for this machine.
This piece of machinery is amazing, and if publisher's are smart, they'll jump on this. Of course, I'm not going to argue that publishers of any kind of medium are smart, so we'll have to wait and see.
Crikey, why does everyone have to take everything so literal? So, perhaps they would forecast demand a bit, and print up some extra copies. It's a helluva lot easier to forecast demand 24 hours in advance (or less), than it is 1 month in advance (or more).
Standard soft-cover books? I'm not real sure what that means, I guess it depends on your standard reading material. IMO, standard soft-covers would be novels and the like, printed on cheap stock with limited typefaces, with no color pictures, and perhaps a few black and white illustrations or drawings. Of course, that may come from my habit of reading Westerns and Mystery novels.
If, by standard, you're referring to something like a photo-montage book, with glorious full-page color photographs, then I'd have to admit that you may have a point. But, most everything in between, from novels to self-help to religion to cookbooks to most computer books to most magazines could be reproduced in fairly high quality by this machine.
Well, I didn't see any specs on the machine (nor did I, I admit, look for any), so I don't know what the heaviest weight paper it can use would be, but I think most books these days are soft-cover. For those that are diehard into hardcovers, then you should be willing to pay a premium for them (as you already do).
The more I think about it, the more I have to agree with you. Why? Because publishers, being of the old-school business leagues, ar eprobably afraid to invest in something better than what they have now. That, and short-sighted fellows not realizing the true potential of a machine like this.
Okay, fine-tune the idea some, and have top-sellers or featured books as "display models". Perhaps have 1 or 3 or 4 of these on the store shelves, and you can either purchase those or take the little bar code tag to the cashier who will print you out a fresh new copy. You still eliminate the vast majority of warehousing and retail space, and eliminate distribution costs. As for differences between online shopping and brick and mortar, I'm not sure we should strive for differences. If these books were already digitized in a standard format (a by-product of switching to this machine) web sites could easily offer you a list of (searchable) titles, complete with cover art and back cover info, as well as perhaps, the first chapter to tease you into buying it. Click a button to buy it, and by the time you got to the store it'd be ready for you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems, according to this Xerox brochure (PDF), that the DocuTech 6135 (and 6180) can't automatically trim the books. Nor, can it stitch together more than 70 pages (@20lb) or bind together more than 125 pages (@20lb). Their optional Signature Booklet Maker II, which boasts "fully automatic booklet making", is limited to 22 pages at 20lb. I don't think that this would cut it as a book-on-demand system.
I can see how this would be useful. E-books and the Web are great, but they suck for most kinds of prolonged "serious" reading. LED and e-ink technology is likely to improve electronic reading, but I doubt they will match printed books anytime within the next decade.
I do worry about whether this will push high-quality printed books out of the market, but the history of the publishing industry suggests that it won't. Publishers can use this technology to time-shift, e.g. sell an expensive hardback book, then go to paperback, then distribute the title to bookmaking machines.
Neither does the article. ;)
Fair point, but I did think the "children's book" example was a little suspect. I'm willing to bet that this was a slim novella, not a Steven King monstrosity.
So, has anyone seen actual throughput figures for this beastie then?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
- Also, in the immediate future, publishers will likely only want to pay to digitise their bestsellers, not educational or special interest texts
I think you may have this backwards; the real economic benefit to publishers comes when they can do it the other way around.Oh, you're quite right, and I agree completely. But I'm thinking about what will likely happen, which is that big publishers won't touch it with a barge pole because it will cost them up front and the rewards are small. Yes, it's a boon to small and special interest publishers, but they still have the cost of making a digital version available, again with the risk of making very little money off of it. They're talking about having a secure system to avoid piracy (ha!), so it's hardly a Guttenbergish product, and it's hard to see where the commercial incentive is to buy or support it.
I'm finding that there's a lot of inertia in the publishing business, especially regarding non-print media. Boilerplate contracts are standard for all but the biggest authors, and publishers just don't have the resources to hire savvy people to deal with exploiting new technology, even to the extent of considering it in contracts. There may be exceptions, but I haven't found one yet.
So I'll stick by my prediction that this sort of machine, while a great idea, is going to go through some rocky times (and probably a few owners and formats) before it breaks out of special interest printers and makes it into the high streets and shopping malls.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Mom and Pop bookstores won't be able to afford a $30K Book machine. Barnes & Noble, Borders, Hastings, etc. will. If any store will be hurt, it would probably be the Mom & Pop stores, not the large chains.
o
It sounds like what Marsh did is integrate the copier and an automatic binding machine. That's a nice incremental improvement and may make something like that more accessible to smaller book stores.
But I would ask another question: why do digitally delivered books have to be bound like traditional books? There are a lot of binding systems in widespread use that work just fine with no cutting, no trimming, no glue, etc.
On the other hand, if Amazon uses the same technology, while at the same time partnering with publishers to provide a storage and licensing system that bookstores can tap into, it could put them in the black for a long time.
Imagine this. Not only does Amazon manage to get rid of a large portion of their inventory (very costly) while still providing speedy service, they can tap into the instant gratification market that bookstores enjoy. You go to your local bookstore, tell them the title you want. They go to their "book press" and search through the online database at Amazon to find the correct book, then request that the book be made. This action automatically downloads the text from the Amazon database, and logs a record for that bookstore. The publisher of the book gets a record of who printed what book and simply invoices the stores for what they printed. Imagine the cost savings to EVERYONE! No more overprinting of books that just won't sell. Incredible.
GreyPoopon
--
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
"Classical" literature is much more enjoyable when read from those pretty leather-bound pages than the cheap newspaper-like books that they make you read in high school.
Any kind of textbook should be in quality print. Using the "^" to signify "raised to the power of" is one sign of a tedious lesson.
Study guides - for example the chemistry Problem Solvers series are so bug ugly, who'd want to study from them?
On the other hand if you have a cheap book, you feel better about using a highlighter or writing notes in the margin.
I could just see the pro-copyright community up in arms about this one. Now we can copy books with ease.
Lighning press uses a thermal process and I am not to happy with the results... leave the book in the front seat of your car on a 95 degree day and the pages start to stick together and transfer the text to the page it was sticking to...
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
The idea may not be new, but is will become the way of the future. You will go into a bookstore and use their terminal to look up some book that you want, put in your credit card number, and then the book will be printed for you right there. It will be just like going to LensCrafters and getting your glasses in about an hour (which, by the way, is astonishly accurate in my experience with them). The same thing will happen to the music industry, although in that field it will most likely be a home appliance that can record to the latest media.
Windows is more convenient than Linux just as having an ingrown toenail is more convenient than seeing a podiatrist.
there is just something about the physical medium of a book that demands quality. think of the painstaking craftsmanship that used to go into making each and every book, from laboriously copied and illustrated scrolls to leather-bound, gilt edged classics. granted, we don't see a whole lot of that in modern-day books, but the quality is still much better than a cheaply bound print-out.
i can really only see a justifiable use for this technology in manuals or textbooks that don't need to be preserved as well as the books that are bought to be enjoyed for what they are.... things that have to be read, rather than things we want to read.
"Why is all this crap here?" -- 4-year-old Brandon
Hi,
I read this article, but couldn't find any per-book printing costs. If you use a commercial printer these days, your per-unit print cost is high unless you do at least 1000 copies. If you use a print-on-demand service like Lightning Press, you get per-book costs higher than printing (savings is in waste and cash-flow).
For game and hobby books, here's the numbers. A general rule of thumb is your per-unit cost should be under 1/5th the purchase price. For print, you want maybe $1.50 to print a book, toss in a quarter/book for paying the talent and a little for shipping; that sets a $10 list price. The retailer often gets a 40% discount, distributors a 60% discount. So retailers get 40% and publishers get 40% (of which half is the per-unit cost).
If the per-unit cost goes up, what sort of margin will retailers get, and will publishers see? Do retailers get 40% and push the printing cost back to the publishers? If so, publishers will have their profit margins cut (since I'm pretty darn sure, whatever the cost, the per-book machine costs more than printing several thousand on a web press).
Which means books on demand still won't save the alternative book trade, because the lower profit margin means publishers still will have to be picky about things. It'll be easier and less risky in terms of printing a book, but since publishers still have to pay writers, cover artists, and marketing, there are still barriers.
Cheers,
Sandy
from RPGnet, The Inside Scoop on Gaming
And it sucked then too. One of our professors decided to use a service like this for his trial year of using his textbook, before it went out as an official priting. We despised the book.
* The pages were too big. 8 1/2 by 11 is just too big for a book.
* The covers suck. It's usually just a thicker card, rather than a nice cover like a real book has.
* Pages fall out at random, especially after you mistreat the binding, like everyone does.
* No resale value -- maybe only an issue for a textbook.
In summary, it was just as expensive as a real book, but was no better than a bunch of photocopies in a binder or with a binder clip on them. What's the point?
With the advent of cheap CD-ROMs and .pdf files, it's been damned difficult to get my paws on a real live manual for quite some time.
OK, so call me analog - I like books I can place next to the keyboard and actually read.
If the per-unit price is decent enough, maybe I can start restocking my bookshelves.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
All of this technology is old stuff that's off the shelf, and all of it is already at your neigborhood Kinko's. You can already bring in a CD and walk out with a full-color hardbound book.
The difference is that this is all in one unit (though Kinko's may have that by now too), and that the method of distibution and payment isn't in place at Kinko's. Of course, it isn't in place yet with this guy's invention, either.
The real sticking point, and what this shoddily-researched article fails to mention, is that your insta-book is going to cost you several times as much as a mass-produced volume. Printing out pages one at a time is nowhere near as cost-efficient as printing out thousands of copies at a time. How much is your book coing to cost at 3 cents a page?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
It's called a HP8100DN
with the stapler/stacker it will print (selecting covers from a different drawer) bind and output 8.5X11 books all day long. the only thing I have to do is apply the spine tape to the stapled edge.
I use it regulary to print training manuals and just about every linux documentation on the net available as PS
A 100page duplexed book takes 3.5 minutes to print.
and a paper jam causes 10 sheets of paper to be crumpled/crammed into tiny spaces.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
"Piracy, for example, goes away almost magically, since the network is closed and files are designated for printing, not for viewing on a handheld device or PC."
Don't worry guys, since the files are designated ONLY for printing, we know they'll never be pirated... because they're designated after all. How long do you think that will last?
--
--
RumorsDaily
The author of the article mentions probably the most important possible impact of this, but so far I don't see anyone who recognizes this. By putting one of these in major bookstores across the nation, publishers can now eliminate all the waste that comes from printing too many copies of books.
As I understand the current system, bookstores have a "return policy" with the major publishers. If they buy a book from the publishers, and it sits on the shelf for too long, they can return it. This is a HUGE loss for the publishers, not only because they lose the price of printing the book, but because of the overhead of shipping it out.
As the article mentions, if these machines become widespread, it has great potential to streamline the publishing industry and reduce cost for the consumer.
Oh, and for all those people who are harping on the security concerns, who said that these books had to be on an open network? ATMs talk to each other all the time, and hacking of those networks are minimal. I don't see why they couldn't implement something similar for books.
and I mean, I buy a lot of books..probably at least one a week. Anyhow, this will be nice for a lot of the stuff I like to read for enjoyment...those paperbacks that are a light read (sci-fi, fantasy, my wife and her romance novels). Of course, being able to feel the book before purchasing is a good thing, but I suppose they could have a "demo model" on the shelf. You know what's going to suck though? Someone is going to try and make a scheme out of this that will be effectively a book lease. They will insist that you are just renting the book or some crap like that.
Please, just don't let someone screw this up.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
--LP
Bad thing. Why? A book's ability to be sold often depends on it being on a shelf. (You pick it up, flip the pages, and buy it, never having intented to buy this particular book when you entered the store.) These machines will simply facilitate more of the 'let them pick what we read, watch, eat and sleep with' mentatility content puclishers have, as they will subvert the browsing process and put only the books that the publishers want to sell front and center in advertising associated with the machine.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Heck you could probably automate the whole store!
Customer sits down at screen, searches for, previews titles, selects, enters cash or credit card, walks to end of machine, walks away with actual real book.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
...it's called the Xerox DocuTech.
Try to buy a roll of tape to hold your suitcase shut. Then buy a cup of coffee. Add the experience of the eternal smile and good humor of the check-in handlers, and you'll be softened up to the point that you will need to buy a nicely bound copy of, say, Taiwan's Agricultural Statistics 1980-1989 and go for the leather binding option!
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
You're oversimplifying here. First off, a lot of dreck gets published professionally: books about pyramid power and astrology, for example.
Also, there's no fundamental reason why the organization that judges the quality of the book has to be the same one that distributes it. Currently there's only an economic reason for this coupling of the two roles, since traditional printing has huge setup costs.
What about publishing free-information books? The traditional publishing system makes it unlikely that many publishers will make the investment to print an edition of a book without being guaranteed a monopoly via copyright. Yes, O'Reilly publishes free-information books, but the rest of the industry isn't exactly rushing to follow.
Warning: shameless self-promotion coming up! The Assayer is a site I run for user-contributed book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. The aim is to get the best of both worlds: free information, but with a mechanism to keep from drowning in all the low-quality stuff.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews
Find free books.
Of course, the problem is that a lot of authors' contracts specify that the rights to shop their books to other publishers revert to them when the books go "out of print."
Maybe some person would be able to setup these units in public spaces as complete alternatives to book stores. You could make a VAST array of printed material available on one of these - what do you want the bookstore for? Im thinking about destroying publishing houses all together... authors could simply share a royalty with the "Insta-Book Kiosk" owner. Millions of zines, comics, magazines, books, guttenburg texts with zero incremental costs for increased volumes - you would be able to skip all your traditional 'big publishing' houses at first and just sell 'niche' material (just an absolutly VAST array of it) - and then invite authors to make their back-catalogues available...
Ill bet one, or a collection of PUBLISHERS buy up this company in order to stear it to a 'reasonable and appropriate' usage... and avoid your described scenario all together.
The machine seems like it would be great for circumventing the publishing industry. But remember, publishing is much more than just printing. The Baltimore Sun even serialized this book (on SunSpot) back in 1997 and still very few people found out about it.
1. Besides the industry-wide drying up of venture capital, the big problem we had was a cart-before-the-horse sort of thing. That is, no bookstore wanted us there without a huge database of titles, and no publisher wanted to supply us with titles unless we were in a lot of bookstores. Still, there was more than a modicum of interest expressed by a number of the major book distributors.
2. Don't kid yourself that these books printed on demand will be cheaper. Nobody will start charging you less for your books out of the goodness of their hearts. There are even justifications for increasing the price.
3. New books that you have stored as PDF or something are a snap, but there is considerable labor involved in scanning in existing books so that they can be printed on-demand. Basically, chop the cover off, scan it, (rescan it because the colors are all off ;-), feed the pages into a scanner, digitally remove the scanner shadow from along the binding edge for each page, look over everything to make sure the pictures scanned okay and no pages stuck... It's a huge pain in the ass.
4. As someone else pointed out, the big win here is getting access to books that are out-of-print. Once you have the database built up, there's no reason any book should ever go out of print. A lot of our short-order print requests were for long out-of-print manuals and such. And the other big win is for new writers; there's no risk at all for a publisher to put a new writer's book into the database and if it succeeds, great.
It's an idea whose time will come, obviously. I forget the exact statistic, but something like 40% of the people who request a particular book from the Barnes and Noble information counter come away disappointed, despite their having hundreds of thousands of books in stock. The lost sales figures are staggering.
Here's another very interesting possible application for you to stew over -- machines on the street corner that print you up the daily paper on demand.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
With 10% downtime, that's 185 (short, monochrome, page-paper covered?) books per machine per day. That's not really going to help the Amazons of the world. However, on the Amazon...
Now, that is a big whoop. However, at $30,000 and with lots of moving bits, this beastie might be too expensive to buy and maintain. If you're that cash strapped, you could buy a good printer, cheap PC and hot glue binder that would let you do the same job (and more) for less money (but a little slower).
Also, in the immediate future, publishers will likely only want to pay to digitise their bestsellers, not educational or special interest texts. But have a look on the ebooks usenet groups, and there are plenty of titles out there if you have a PC setup and aren't not that fussed about copyright - and remember, we're now talking about the impoverished here, where we're trying to educate people up to the stage where they do have the leisure and luxury to care about abstract issues like copyright.
As a prospective author currently whoring my way around publishers, I find this an attractive idea. However, it looks as though it falls between two stools, being too small scale for commercial use, but over-engineered and expensive for those who could really benefit. I think they'll find it hard to break out of their initial target niche of corporate documentation departments, although I can also see college bookshops making great use of this to print obscure texts - but at a premium, and assuming that they can get them in a (proprietary!) digital form.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Coming soon to Amazon.com: Just for Karma, the true story of CmdrTaco and Slashdot.org by CowboyNeal...and of course, it'll have ten blank pages at the end, so you can add your own comments.
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Slashdot: When News Breaks, We Give You The Pieces
FreeBSD for the impatient.
First off, I think this is a fairly good idea. Barnes and Nobles no longer has to go from being a gigantic book store with tons of popular titles and a handful of not so popular titles. Furthermore, the little corner bookstore will have the same inventory (and same prices) as the big boys. Point for good.
Second, it should lower book prices (read the section of the article about expensive guess work). Also, good.
Third, chances are, you'll see an actual drop in the number of obscure books that get read. Why? Well, lets go into some depth here...
Whenever I feel like reading something new, and interesting, I go to the book store and just roam around for a bit hoping I'll stumble into something that looks interesting. When I find something, I pick it up, flip through it and decide to buy it or not.
With this system, the above situation is impossible. The book doesn't exist until I buy it. Sure, I can "flip through it" on a computer monitor, just like I can on Amazon. Though, I can honestly say I've never bought a random book off Amazon. Its always been something I planned for, and directly went for. Not to mention, they never put anything but reviews on monitors. After all, they want you to buy the book.
Point for evil. This isn't a good development. No longer will people be able to stumble on little jewels of good literature as easily. Instead they'll have to know what they want, before they can look at it. I'm not sure I feel peachy about that.
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It says they use a hot-glue binding. That's not encouraging; they can be really cheap and nasty. What good is an expensive paperback book (and it will be at least 4 cents a page, more for color) that falls apart halfway through?
Now, if they had a quality paperback binding like you find on, say, Penguin paperbacks, that would be different.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I did some printing in high school, so when a friend was looking at getting a book printed, I called about and got the details.
In about 1995 or so, when I was doing this, not many places could print straight to plates for offset printing. I tracked down one place in the DC Metro area that could, and could do perfect binding [as most places wanted to do crappy plastic combs or wire bound] I think in the end, for a press run of 500 copies, 200 pages, it was about $3k. [20lb offset]. [It might have been 1000 copies, can't remember].
Anyway, we _specifically_ went this route, as it was printed, not copied. From the sounds of this machine, for the speeds it's doing, there's a good chance that it's doing copying. Copying uses toner, which flakes with use, and makes the books slowly become useless.
Ink, however, from offset printing, penetrates the paper, and is good for many, many readings. [Anyone who's had that grad class with the teacher who's too cheap to get their book printed knows these problems....as the letters slowly start disappearing from the pages].
This may be a great invention, and I'm sure that this has its uses, especially for vanity press, but I'm reluctant to say that this is the greatest invention 'till I've seen some samples so I can guage the quality of the printing. [Hell, this might not even support multiple color prints]
Oh...and for manuals, I prefer wire binding, as as I can open up the books flat, or fold them back on themselves.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Well, I don't think there is much value in making a machine that can print out the same titles that you can get from your local B&N (or online, for that matter), because those books (they mention Stephen King's Dreamcatcher) are at least somewhat popular and available (save remote/country areas, where this machine could be used for that purpose).
Where I think the most important use comes in is in the opportunities this opens up for Indy writers and zine publishers. This way, seemingly anyone can get a "professional" looking hardcopy of their own material, whereas previously they would be confined to the copying machine at Staples.
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#nohup cat
"Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes."
Wow. The scalability of this things is awesome! To be able to make books at the nanolevel all the way up to ones with enough pages to bridge the earth and moon! The implications of this new technology reaches far beyond any printing system, that's for sure.
To be able to cut paper of *any* size, whether having a length of the sun's or an atom's diameter. Amazing.
And talk about strong bindings!
I figured this would be pretty much common knowledge among /. readers, but I guess not.
Iuniverse.com has been using something similar for quite a while to allow people to self-publish. For $99 or so, your book gets put in a format these machines understand, assigned an ISBN number and entered in the Ingram book database. Amazon and BN then can sell your book. The books only get printed when someone orders one and then shipped out. The more successful ones sometimes end up on BN shelves in the brick-n-morter stores.
A great many of the books have been utter drek, but for those looking to get a few copies of their novel out, it's worth it. They are also targeting companies for internal manuals and custom books, professors who write their own texts, authors whose books are out of print, etc. If Amazon or your local Borders got one of these machines, it's still likely that a service like this would exist to get your book into the system.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
The most esoteric taste could, in theory, be satisfied anywhere and anytime: Running to catch the 6 a.m. flight to Denver, you could stop at an airport kiosk and buy a title as obscure as Thomas Merton's The New Man just as easily as you now pick up a copy of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.
- <person> is running to catch a flight;
- for some reason, <person> wishes to purchase <product in question> first; and
- Cannot rely on the old way of getting <product in question>, as it does not provide <specific parameter> that only <hot new technology> can provide.
*sigh*Folks, I fully endorse giving bogus information to online surveys, but honestly. We've got to stop telling them that we address most of our shopping, reading and entertainment needs while running to catch our daily transcontinental flight. This is getting nutty.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions