Vending Machine For Books Coming Next Year 214
An anonymous reader writes "CNN writes about a $50,000 machine that can print books on demand. It can print up to 550 pages and put a binding on the book in seven minutes. It will be debuting in a select number of U.S. libraries in 2007. The machine is the 'output' end of a service called On Demand Books, which is also just debuting. From the article: 'Some 2.5 million books are now available - about one million in English and no longer under copyright protection. On Demand accesses the volumes through Google and the Open Content Alliance, among other sources. [Co-founder Dane] Neller predicts that within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.'"
Re:or (Score:4, Insightful)
People that are proud to own actual copies of actual books will continue to purchase the Real Deal(TM) and not some convenience machine regurgitation. The only toe-hold on sustainability I can see for such a marketing scheme is in airports, for about seven years.
This concept just feels a bit like a photo booth at a mall or amusement park - a nice novelty but not particularly common or successful.
Re:or (Score:5, Insightful)
* Would-be authors: For every one book that's published, there's a hundred that aren't. There is a huge glut of supply in books. This drives a lot of authors to desperation. Many turn to vanity presses, foolishly hoping to get big. They think that they have what it takes to be the next J.K. Rowling. They don't. Yes, there are problems with the publishing industry. Much of what makes a bestseller has to do with promotion. But if you can't get a big house to read you or an agent to sign you, odds are bloody good that your work is not that good.
Lower PoD cost will make their day, and hopefully push vanity presses out of business.
For those not familiar with the term, a "Vanity" press is a publisher that you pay to print and (supposedly) promote your book. The reality is that they have no incentive for you to make it big, and so just overcharge you for printing. Lulu and cafepress are a less scummy version of "self publishing": they tend to act only as printers. You'll still go nowhere, but you'll blow less of your money in doing so. This is just the next step.
* Legitimate publishers: There are some very messed up things in the way that the print world works currently, and it ends up wasting a lot of money.
1) Print run size guestimates. Publishers have to guess at how much a book is going to sell. The larger they guess, the cheaper the unit cost is, but the more likely they'll get stuck with a warehouse full of unsold books. The hope is that PoD will make producing a single book cost the same as producing a large number of books, and that they can produce them as orders come in. One big beneficiary will be small-time authors: if a publisher isn't taking as much of a risk, they can take on more clients and ones less likely to hit it big.
2) Returns. This is a really silly thing about the industry. Big book chains not only get big discounts, but they also get obscenely kind return policies. If a seller orders a bunch of books, they can return them at the publisher's expense if they don't sell. They can do this with a large chunk of their total inventory. Indie bookstores can do this too, but not as much. This blows a huge amount of money in shipping costs. Miss Snark (one of the most famous agent bloggers) once complained about a bookstore that was relocating across the street who simply returned most of their books, then reordered them at the across the street location. Most returns won't get resold, so they're just waste. Cost-effective PoD could seriously alter this situation.
The key is the phrase cost-effective. Cost-effective includes quality as well.
Pffft (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:or (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because some doesn't get published doesn't mean that the book isn't good, it just means that the publisher doesn't think it can be profitable.
Re:Too slow (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:pulp (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? This would potentially be better for the environment. Rather than a publisher printing X copies of a book, Y of which wont sell (Y may not be much smaller than X, depending on the book) a book is only printed when someone actually wants to buy it. No overstock, no waste.
Re:Bah! (Score:1, Insightful)
5 cents per page or 0.05 cents per page? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Too slow (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you either:
1: Buy exclusively hardcover, thus missing a good majority of the works ever printed (not necessarily a bad thing; you might be down to only 60% crap) and paying a good 300% over the standard
2: Don't understand that your books are likely ALREADY printed using an identical process.
Either way, this thing won't fly (as it's been trying to for the last ten years now) if it doesn't meet the standard of quality.
Wait until 2109 (Score:4, Insightful)
Based on law effective as of 2006 in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and an estimation of the expected life span of a healthy American writer, you may have to wait until 2110 for books whose author is Neal Stephenson to become available on a print-on-demand system.