Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome to another episode.  Another cartoon that Dell Isaacs has found, it shows a kit talking to his father and he says, “What are you reading, dad?”  And dad said, “An article about the demise of newspapers.”  And of course, he’s reading it in a newspaper.  That’s the dichotomy of the world we live in, the irony of the world we live in. 

Several little pieces of information out there and things I wanted to comment about.  Kansas.  Good ole’ Kansas.  Revenue Department asking to charge Kansans from filing paper tax returns.  They want to charge you $25 if you don’t do it electronically.  They say that would cover the cost of their department of processing a paper tax return.  Now, I don’t think you can force everybody to go electronic.  There are just people who are not going to be able to do it, or if they try it, they’re going to make terrible mistakes.  We’re going to spend more time trying to correct that stuff than if you actually put it down on paper and you can actually see what you do. 

They say the department is also reducing printing costs by not printing as many instruction booklets.  Oh, that’s very nice because now there’ll be more mistakes because there is less information about how to do it properly.  In fact, if you want a booklet, it’s $25 as well.  Twenty-five dollars for instructions on how to do a tax return, which is mandatory.  Now, I assume you can download electronically, but then you have to read it on the screen, or you have to print it out from a very expensive – well, from a cheap printer with expensive ink, if you will. 

In any case, Kansas, I’m glad I’m not there; although I have to go there for university soon.  How can I avoid that?  

Printing Error Inflates 13,000 Bills.  All right, so I’m reading this article that says the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority says that about 13,000 customers received bills that were off by thousands of dollars due to erroneous decimals.  They blame the printer.  They say the printing company, or the printing system, or whatever, it is made the mistake.  As you get into it, what happened was the person who was formatting the document selected a European format that put commas in instead of periods.  So of course everyone’s bill was off. 

One person who had a bill for $45 it came in at $4,500.  The data is good; it is really nothing more than a bad print file.  Blame the print, right?  Officials said the corrected bills were mailed out and anyone who paid an inflated balance from an incorrect bill will be given a refund. 

If I got one for $4,500 for water and sewer, that’s a lot of water and a lot of sewer. 

I love the illustrations in this article, by the way.  This is for the Espresso On Demand Book Printing Machine, which is now install at a number of bookstores around the United States and a few around the world.  Last week, Xerox sent out a press release that they are now – that their equipment, some of their equipment is being used in the machines.  It’s called the Espresso Book Machine, and it’s made by the On Demand Book Company.  And really what it is, it’s not one machine, it comes in a big box, but in there are really three things:  One is a digital printer, using toner in most cases that prints the black and white book block.  The text pages of the book.  The second device is an ink jet printer, or sometimes a toner-based printer, that’s color, that prints the cover.  Covers are normally in color.  You’re limited to certain sizes, by the way, based upon the size of the printer.  So, I don’t think they go beyond 6 x 9, no 5 1/2, 6 x 9, and maybe they do 7 x 10 books.  But they certainly don’t do gigantic books, although they could do an 8 ½ x 11 because that would probably be the size of the paper. 

Then the book block is combined with the cover in the third part of the machine, which is actually a binder.  So, it scores the covers, it folds them, they put glue down, the book block goes into it, they put it between two grippers, they trim it on three sides, and out comes a finished book.  And you’ve essentially waited for it at the bookstore.  They probably sent you to the expensive coffee bar that they have, which is where bookstores now make their money.  They don’t make them on books, they make them on coffee.  Oh, and buns, muffins, and things like that. 

There’s tons of material out there, I mean, all the Goggle books are in electronic format, almost all the publishers now have their stuff in electronic format.  So, you can go into a bookstore and if the book is not in inventory, they will print it out for you there.  They pay a little bit more for it at that point in time.  In some of the cases, the bookstores are going one step beyond and they will let you bring a file in and they’ll print a book there for you as well.  So, it could be anything.  It could be a book that you put together yourself. 

This article is about The Third Place Books.  Where are they?  Seattle.  So, it’s a commercial book store.  I know there’s one here at the Harvard Coup in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  There’s one at Blackstone’s, I think it is, in London.  There’s one at the World Bank, they have a bookstore.  But they’re scattered around right now.  Their plan is to install a few hundred of them over the next few months.  There’s sort of been a pent up demand for this idea of having an onsite, on demand book producing device. 

Now, I think this is a great idea because no bookstore will ever be able to hold all the books that you would want to buy.  So they tend to emphasize the best sellers.  They don’t have too many of them.  You don’t find a lot of backlist titles, so your problem is that you’re forced to go to Amazon.com or one of the online book services because there’s no alternative.  Where do you find that book?  

So, I love the idea that you can go into the bookstore, perhaps buy whatever you want that’s there, and then if there’s something you need, they can find the file and download it and print it out.  And theoretically you can wait for it, or you can go somewhere and come back and pick it up at that point in time. 

I like the idea that Xerox got involved.  They were using other company’s printers.  This means the machine should technically be more reliable because that would be the issue.  It’s in a book store, so it’s not in a place where you have a lot of technical support, so the person who is running the machine has to clean it, adjust it, maintain it, and handle any problems.  And of course, there are three things that can go wrong, it could be the printer for the book block, it could be the printer for the cover, or it could be the binding system itself.  And so all of those pieces have to be organized, as well as the interface to the computer that is connected to the internet so that they can download all of that stuff. 

So, those were the items that I found out there in recent time.  

In our next episode, they’ll probably have a little clip at the end of this, will be a little bit longer because it’s an article I found on 25 things about to become extinct.  Now, by the way, there’s probably a 26th one, and that’s me. 

And that’s my opinion.