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Blackwell Launches Print-On-Demand Trial In the UK
krou writes "In Dec. 2006, we discussed the Espresso Book Machine. Well, on April 27 the bookseller Blackwell will launch a three-month trial of the machine in its Charing Cross Road branch in London as a 'print on demand' service for shoppers in an effort 'to consign to history the idea that you can walk into a bookshop and not find the book you want.' When the trial begins, it will be able to print any of some 400,000 titles; Blackwell's overall goal is to extend this to a million titles by the summer, and to spread out more machines to the rest of its sixty stores once it works out pricing. Currently, they charge shelf price for in-print books, and 10 pence per page for those out of print (about $55 for a 300-page book), but are analyzing customer behavior to get a better pricing model. Says Blackwell chief executive Andrew Hutchings: 'This could change bookselling fundamentally. It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalization of the local bookshop industry.' Their website notes that in addition to getting books printed in-store, in future you will be able to order titles via their site. (They also mention that one of the titles you can print is the 1915 Oxford Poetry Book, which includes one of Tolkien's first poems, 'Goblin's Feet.')" You'll also be able to bring in your own book to print — two PDF files, one for the book block and one for the cover.
How long before publishers demand a ever increasing amount of fees for this service? They already have problems with the idea of digital distribution.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
I've always had trouble getting decent(ly priced) copies of old philosophy books and this would help me a great deal. I just wish they were testing this in the US...
At least as far as independent publishing of books goes, there is something sort of similar. I found that out when I was trying to find a place to print my thesis. This service called Lulu www.lulu.com which would print your PDF file as a book and also put it up for sale on Amazon (ISBN and all). Now, when I get the corrections from my examiners I do plan to put my thesis at Amazon (just to see how many people would pay to get a hard copy of my research), even if I make the PDF freely available on my website.
www.meneguzzi.eu/felipe
Is fifteen cents per page a normal on-demand charge? Books with nothing special about them will cost a few dollars to print conventionally. Blackwell's costs are higher I'm sure and they have the retail share as well. But still, $55 for a book that might otherwise retail for $10-15?
10p per page is too dear. A lot of the books I am after are ~1000 pages, that's £100 (~$150), between 2p & 5p per page is a lot more affordable.
The site is slashdotted, but here's a link to an alternative Blackwell site.
That's a crazy price. My uni's print shop will do it for less than that, hardback, and they have an actual human gluing it together. I know because I've done it with an out of print text book that the author was kind enough to provide me with a pdf of.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
"They also mention that one of the titles you can print is the 1915 Oxford Poetry Book, which includes one of Tolkien's first poems, 'Goblin's Feet."
If it's from 1915 it would be in the public domain, so why would anyone buy it instead of just printing one themselves??
In my experience the print-on-demand books are very low quality. It hurts me when I pay over US$100 for a book and get a print-on-demand (Springer.... I'm looking at you). If only they were upfront about it.
We've had the technology for in-store print on demand for at least a decade. Darn near every bookstore should be able to print you a copy of darn near every book in its catalog in a few minutes. The fact that this is not already common (at $10 or less per 300 pages) is due to stupid business decisions all through the publishing chain, not to lack of technology.
And at least 20 years ago a woman I knew who had a fairly large (and quite nice) butt wondered why we didn't have semi-automated make-to-order clothing stores in every mall, where someone like her would look at a style sample, say, "I'll take that style in fabric #402," and have them either measure her on the spot or used her measurements they already had on file, and make her exactly what she wanted, in a size that fit *her* body instead of an arbitrary measurement.
This was all technically feasible, including the beeper you'd carry around the mall while you did your other shopping, that would alert you when your new slacks were ready at the "Pants That Fit" store.
If nothing else, make or print to order gets rid of the remainder problem that plagues both book publishers and clothing manufacturers.
for most books, in print our out.
Our first attempt to print a book was not entirely successful.
The Times's choice - from a rather limited list, the full catalogue not being available until next week - was a 1919 volume called Heroes of Aviation, a book of stirring tales of such First World War flying aces as Albert Ball and someone called Georges Guynemer The Miraculous, which was unavailable for more than half a century until it was revived by an online publisher.
Thor Sigvaldason, co-founder of On Demand Books, the people behind the machine, clicked a mouse and it started making whirry, photocopier-like noises.
Laser-printed pages started flying out from the first half of the machine into the second, where the book is made.
It was clamped, glued, stuck to the cover, cut to size and spewed out of a letterbox-sized slot in the side of the machine - where it promptly fell apart.
"Things do happen," said Mr Sigvaldason, phlegmatically. "It is actually perfectly bound. It just doesn't have a cover."
Another attempt and, after 13 minutes - rather slow, but then there was a pause to empty the wastepaper box - a perfect, warm and rather industrial-smelling copy of Heroes of Aviation was in my hands, mint-fresh and looking just like a real book.
Which it was.
From the description of the process above - my (educated) guess is that the only real problem might be with the binding of the covers.
Mainly related to the number of pages. Below the certain number of pages there is probably not enough surface for glue to catch on that fast.
Even if it is a very fast binding glue, and there is enough surface to bind to - if the machine is meant to operate akin to a photocopier (quick and dirty) things like loose covers are bound to happen.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My old university bookstore was one of the first places to get one of these machines, and the sales pitch was that it would be cheaper to get some textbooks from the machine than off of the shelf.
I left before I got a chance to see if that was the case, but people were excited about it.
Sorry, it's more like a desperate attempt to cling to the old sales model. You have to switch gears to accommodate the future - electronic books. That means no paper printing at all. Anyone who plans to build a long-lasting business by clinging to the past in the face of a technological revolution will have an uphill battle ahead of them.
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Digital copiers and printers cost a fair sum of money. Binders, cutter etc. also.
Add to that the fact that you would need either very educated customers who would bring you a properly formatted PDF file each time (pure science fiction) or very educated employees who would be able to reformat the book in minutes to the customers satisfaction (also science fiction).
You could churn out sub-par quality books (think taking Word files formatted on one PC-printer combo to another PC-printer combo) OR you could have a waiting period.
"Bring in the text today and have it ready next week."
And still - a shop that would offer such a service would have to print out thousands of books before they would start making any money out of it.
And it would still cost more that 10$ per 300 pages.
As for your lady-friend's predicament...
There are places that offer such service. They are called "tailor-shops" or just plain "tailors".
But they don't make the clothes while you do your other shopping and it costs a BIT more than buying clothes "off the rack".
Standardized clothing measurements mean that the manufacturer can make more clothes faster and sell them cheaper.
Back in the day when people used to have all their clothing made to size there were a lot less suits per capita and a lot more stitches and patches per suit - cause suits were expensive.
Just as they are today. A pair of jeans and a T-shirt cost less than a suit, which in turn costs far less than a tailor-made suit.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
While I'd consider this great for text books and manuals, is anybody ever that desperate to get a fiction book that may take weeks, that they can't wait a day? Almost every interdependent bookshop I know will take a day to get any book I can think of in a day (two if i turn up after their last phone call to HQ), at no extra charge (hell I've even messed up and ordered a book that it turned out I didn't buy and still didn't have to pay a thing), £23.40 is a bit much for foundation (RRP £6.99) and £41 for dune is defiantly excessive.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
This will relegate the bookstore to the status of the stupid $0.25 bucking horse ride in the mall square... err maybe those are $1 these days. In any case, I'm not saying it isn't a good thing but this has the potential to crush both the independents and Barnes and Noble. Who wants to deal with lines and people when you can get anything you want out of a vending machine?
"If nothing else, make or print to order gets rid of the remainder problem that plagues both book publishers and clothing manufacturers."
It also neatly addresses the counterfeiting and piracy problem as well.
http://www.ladyaleta.com/aleta/tolkien.htm
Much faster than waiting for the book to print.
So why would I need Blackwell?
Wonderful! I can hardly wait until the DVD stores grab this idea! Here in Thailand, legal CD/DVD stores have a hundred titles, and pirate shops have thousands! You can never find what you want in the legal shops.
You also got the costs of storing all those bolts of cloth that need to either fed into the machine by a human being or have a HUGE system for all the various types and colors.
Sorry, but paperback style books that use 2 types of paper and 1 type of glue are feasable. Cloths that use all kinds of different materials are not, unless you want to be the one to tell the average woman she is going to wear the exact same materials as everyone else. Just check, how many people even have the same buttons on their jeans?
Anyway, it is far simpler, if you want a custom made piece, you go to a tailor. They still exist and they don't even cost that much (when you consider quality).
The clothing industry is just to different, to many styles, to many variations. Consider this, count the number of clothing stores vs the number of bookstores (which helps explain election results).
This printing on demand business won't be making chewable books, or pop-up books, or braille books, or picture books, or round books, or maps or hand-bound books. It spits out paperbacks.
A machine that could make jeans, 2-3 choices of cloth, different cuts and different sizes is "easy". A machine that can do all fashion would consume much of a supermarket just for its cloth feeder.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This isn't a quibble. With some serious investment, a one off machine could doubtless be made to saddle stitch sections and then burst bind them, producing a book that would last long enough to be worth 15c/page. There's a chicken and egg issue here - demand needs to be created to justify investment, but a poor quality product will not create demand.
A one off machine will always cost more per copy than a full sheetfed press and binding line, but an awful lot of books get remaindered and pulped. One real disadvantage of a good one off machine for conventional publishers is that the cost of publication and promotion enables them to be gatekeepers, to protect their revenue model (just like the recording industry.) If Joe Bloggs can write his book, get it imposed as a PDF and make it available for on demand printing, the entire vanity press world just went out of the window.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
This is just a covert operation to get computer generated books accepted by the public. This was predicted by Roald Dahl.
... because of the copying issue, yes? These books are printed. You can't distribute them digitally.
Paper then is another form of DRM and therefore must be evil.
Information wants to be FREE !!!!!11!!!
[/humour]
isn't this getting carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, by binding the carbon into paper? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration#Carbon_capture_and_storage
I thought that the Amazon Kindle did away with any reason to travel to the book store. I can get on amazon.com, search for any popular book, and download it straight to my device in a matter of minutes. It takes up no space, is easy to read, hard to scratch, and can read the books to me when I'm driving.
..Are of muhc les quality..
If you dnot pay anyhting you won get any quality assrance..
Serisly, teh typos in that link are bad.. vrey bad!