POD Book Model Gains Notoriety —Cagle

A RECENT issue of Time magazine showed the publication’s list of “The Best Inventions of the Year.” Among the technologies: The Espresso Book Machine by On Demand Books.

The Espresso churns out books, not cappuccino, in very short order; in fact a 300-page paperback with color cover can be produced in a mere three minutes, or 15-20 library quality paperbacks per hour. And speaking of threes, production costs for the Espresso comes out to a mere $3 a shot. The machine costs $50,000, and the Time blurb predicted it could “transform libraries into mini-bookstores, making hard-to-find titles as accessible as cappuccinos.”

According to its Website, the Espresso machine can produce books in any language, in quantities of one, sans any human intervention. Machines are currently residing at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington, DC, and the Library of Alexandria in Egypt.

On Demand Books is also working on technology to tap a network of content that can be accessed and produced through The Espresso Book Machine Network. The system will accept multiple formats and respect licenses and rights.

At $3 per book for a 300-page work with color cover, the Espresso may address the chink in some print-on-demand models’ armor.

THE VALUE OF PUBLICITY: A vice president of marketing for a well-known printer sat across the conference table from me. I had just posed a simple and innocuous question: “How can we improve communications with your firm, and include it in more stories?”

The veep then caught me off guard, asking me who our audience consisted of, which was pretty obvious, but I suspect she was making a point. Her response was succinct...in essence, her company did not want or need to be mentioned in trade magazine stories with other firms. She didn’t want other companies to benefit from her firm’s knowledge and, frankly, fellow printers aren’t the people she wanted to reach, anyway.