Hi this is Frank Romano. Well I saw an article the other day and it had to do with the fact that companies we’re using vending machines to cut back on retail employees. It says, “Vending machines make gains as retail jobs drop”, and it shows this guy standing in front of a whole series of vending machines and I thought well, you know, they did that once for books. In fact I think I’ve seen a few of them around today but back in 1935 Penguin Books created the Penguin incubator. They had pioneered selling very inexpensive books at railroad stations and the next step was to create these little vending machines for the smaller stations. Well today’s analog to that would be the Express-O Book Machine, where you can choose from a series of files for a book that you want and it will print it out for you on demand. It has a printer for printing the book block, it has a printer for printing the covers and it brings it all together, binds it, trims it and out comes a finished book. I’ve seen these machines around the world. I’ve seen them in England, Germany, and here in the United States.
The Express-O Book Machine is now being marketed by Xerox, and it’s making its way into bookstores. So it’s sort of the modern equivalent of the retail oriented vendor machine for whatever it is; candy, soda and now of course, you can have books done on demand. You don’t even have to have an inventory in the machine; it makes it as you need it.
But then there’s a whole other side to the publishing world that goes beyond printing. And this is an article about a young lady that says this 26 year old is making millions cutting out traditional publishers with Amazon Kindle. What she’s done is she’s created a book, she’s hyped it, promoted it, it sold through Amazon only as a Kindle e-book. She gets to keep 70% of the book sales. She sells 100,000 copies a month; 100,000 copies a month. So there’s no publisher involved so the publisher doesn’t get to keep most of the money and pay a percentage to the author. Here the author is keeping most of the money. She has no inventory. She has no printing. She has no ink; no paper. Of course, if she goes through other distributors she’d have to pay them a royalty of some sort as well. There are a handful like her around the world who’ve been able to get traction on what they’ve done mostly because they’ve helped with the promotion of whatever it is because once you do this, Amazon really doesn’t do a heck of a lot to promote you nor does any other publisher. I know that from experience. If you’re very, very famous and have a book that’s a bestseller, then they go out of their way to get you on talk shows. But if you write books about the printing industry, you don’t get anything.
So it’s very interesting how this article about vending machines got me to thinking about hey the next order of books is maybe not ordering them on demand, maybe it’s getting them in digital form but there’ll always be someone who wants a copy of that printed book to save, to use for whatever reason. And that’s why I think we’ll still have machines to do printing whether it’s in quantity or in onesies. And in any case, that’s my opinion.
There’s an article that appeared recently that says researchers aim to print human skin.
Discussion
By John J. Conley on Apr 07, 2011
Interesting look back at the history of vending machines for books (side note – if you ever come across a preserved Penguin Incubator – drop me a line I’d love to see one!) We’re seeing a lot of interest in the Espresso Book Machine – and I believe it’s because people want options.
I also read the article you mention, and whether its self publishers like Amanda (the 26-year-old profiled in the article,) the bankruptcy of the brick & mortar titan Borders or the introduction of ebooks, the face of publishing is changing fast. What we’re left with really though, are just more options. As proven by her success, there’s an audience for Amanda’s books, but there’s also a large segment of the population (like you and I) who appreciate holding a book in their hands and thumbing through the pages, versus reading digital text on a Nook.
For publishers looking to serve those of us not willing to hand over our hard copy books, on demand technology is helping them compete by printing shorter initial runs of books with reprint options based on demand.
We are in a digital age – but digital can help both traditional publishers as well as self-publishers like Amanda – it’s just a matter of choices and conforming to consumer tastes – with the consumer winning either way.
As a consumer, what book would you print, if you could print what you want on-demand?
John Conley, Vice President of Publishing¬, Xerox
Discussion
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