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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?"
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?
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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.
As the article notes, there's a huge amount of waste in the book industry. Ever stop and think that if your Barnes & Noble or Borders is able to stock the entire O'Reilly library that every other B&N and Borders does too? O'Reilly pays to print all of those copies, but doesn't get paid until they get sold. If Microsoft Bob in a Nutshell turns out to be a bomb, O'Reilly takes it on the chin.
So this guy would sell his machine to publishers, distributors, and booksellers to eliminate all that wasted printing. B&N gets the machine to offer more titles than they fit in their shelf space. Borders gets the machine because the distributor is tired of renting all that wharehouse space. Your local indie bookseller gets one because the publisher wants to offer their titles everywhere possible, but can't take the risk to print enough copies of a potential blockbuster. The corner mega-store gets one of their own so that they can sell you a library as you pick up your groceries and get your oil changed. Finally, your city library gets one so that when some little snot steals Harry Potter and the Increasingly Over-Commercialized Pot of Gold, they can just print another copy.
At $30k, it's affordable for all those applications and more. This guy could sell a ton of machines without ever having to listen to one whiny retail-level customer or worry about the ever-changing copyright law.
-sk
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