ESPRESSO BOOK MACHINE AT HARVARD BOOK STORE

On October 1, 2009, NWU Boston's Barbara Mende went to see a demo of the new Espresso book machine, which had just arrived at Harvard Book Store (an independent bookstore in Cambridge, unaffiliated with Harvard).

The machine, also known as Paige M. Gutenborg, is leased with software from On Demand Books of NYC (www.ondemandbooks.com

). On Demand has a technical partnership with Lightning Source, the Ingram-owned POD printer. It also has agreements with Google Books and several publishers. Harvard, as a customer, simply reports its sales to OnDemand and pays a certain amount per book. The machine itself looks like a large popcorn machine; you can see what's going on inside as the book is printed.

The books themselves look like trade paperbacks, some with attractive covers and most with unattractive typefaces. Color is used on the covers, but not yet in the interior photos. The sources are PDF files. POD manager Bronwen Blaney printed several books while I was there. They took less than ten minutes each to scan, print, and bind.

The machine produces three categories of books:

Public domain and out-of-print books. These are from the Google Books inventory. Nothing will be done with Google on in-print books until the settlement negotiations are over. Harvard pays On Demand, which pays Google. Bronwen believes that Google will pay the authors as it would for any other book. Customers can buy these books for $8 each.

There are software bugs that, for example, print authors' names on the front pages as "Verne, Jules" and "Twain, Mark." Harvard is effectively a beta site that is helping On Demand and Google to work out these bugs.

In-print books. On Demand has agreements with several major publishers for their catalogs of books that have been around for a while. Simon & Schuster was mentioned. One book I saw was copyrighted 1994.

The publishers set the prices of the books. Again, it is assumed that the publisher will pay royalties to the authors. One question here is whether the prices will be substantially less than retail. A more important one may be whether this may be a means for publishers to keep their books in print forever - not only are the files available, but the books are actually being sold.

Are these eBooks? Personally, I think we'd have a hard time arguing that they were. They're books. They may be printed electronically, but aren't all books these days?

POD services. To me, this is an exciting offering. Harvard will work with authors to create files to the proper specifications. The setup charge will be $70. After that, authors pay 4¢ to 8¢ a page for printing each book, depending on specs. See http://www.harvard.com/bookmachine/

for details.

Harvard and On Demand will not be publishers of these books. The books will be truly self-published. The author secures the copyright and an ISBN if desired. Harvard will carry the books in its inventory, mainly electronically although it may print a few books to put on its shelves. Authors can refer buyers to Harvard, which will sell books to them. Or, of course, authors can order and sell their own books.

There is no editing, no marketing, no support - but then, according to most of our members who have used POD houses, you can't get that anyway. With the money you save, you can hire a copyeditor and a publicist.