By
John Tozzi
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Vance Alexander sent 35 query letters to publishers and
agents to pitch his book, a historical novel about a young
slave in 1801 Connecticut who escapes to Canada. No one bit.
So the retired architectural designer decided to publish
it himself. He joined more than 100 aspiring authors at the
library in Darien, Conn., on a recent Thursday night for a
demo of the technology ready to fulfill their literary
ambitions: the Espresso Book Machine.
About five feet high and eight feet wide, it turns a
manuscript into a warm paperback, bound and trimmed, in under
five minutes. Selling a big machine to print books may seem
quixotic when millions of readers are migrating to Kindles and
iPads. On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso, is
betting on authors like Alexander -- and on the emotional
connection readers and writers have with paper pages that bend
and tear and make a sound when you turn them.
Alexander (a nom de plume—his real last name is Fazzino)
shrinks at the thought of publishing his novel strictly in
digital form. "It's too …" He searches for the word. "It's too
ephemeral," he says. "I like holding a book in my hand."
While e-books get all the attention, the publishing
business is going through a further shift: Digital printing
means books can be manufactured in tiny batches, instead of
the runs of 5,000 copies or more required to make traditional
offset printing cost-effective. A handful of "pay-to-publish"
digital presses such as Lulu and AuthorHouse are letting
writers pump out new works like never before. In 2010, authors
published 133,000 titles on their own, up from 51,000 four
years earlier, according to Bowker, the company that assigns
books unique identifiers known as ISBNs.
The Espresso links a database of digital book files to a
Xerox machine that prints pages, a photo printer to make the
cover, and a system that collates, binds, and trims the whole
package. In addition to self-published books, it can print
public domain works from Google Books and titles that
publishers like HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have agreed
to license.
Jason Epstein, On Demand's chairman, published authors
like Norman Mailer and Vladimir Nabokov and co-founded the
"New York Review of Books" during a half-century publishing
career, mostly at Random House. He and Dane Neller, former
chief executive of gourmet emporium Dean & Deluca, founded the
company in 2003, licensing the technology from an inventor and
installing the first Espresso three years later. They've got
90 machines installed or on the way around the world, Neller
says.
Both Neller and Xerox, which has distributed Espressos
since 2010, decline to say how much they cost, though
customers estimate the price at over $100,000. Neller says On
Demand's revenue is in the millions. Xerox works with
customers to lease the machines at an affordable rate, says
Steve Simpson, Xerox's vice president of new business
ventures. (The company is an investor, along with Ingram -- a
large book distributor -- and Pete Peterson, co-founder of the
private equity firm Blackstone Group.)
The challenge for On Demand is that "the technology is
still not quite there, as far as its size and its
reliability," says Kelly Gallagher, vice president of
publisher services for Bowker. "It's like where we first
started with computers, before we quite got to a personal
computer." To broaden its reach, the 16-employee company has
started operating some machines directly, including the one in
Darien. New Espressos are on the way to Powell's Books in
Portland, Ore., and the Brooklyn Public Library in New York.
At Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., the Espresso
patters along constantly, printing about 1,500 books a month.
Roughly two-thirds of those are self-published, says owner
Jeff Mayersohn. ("Everybody in Cambridge has a manuscript,"
quips Epstein.)
The machine, which the staff has named Paige M.
Gutenborg, isn't quite a moneymaker for the store yet. "It
obviously has to advance, the price has to come down, and the
speed has to go up," says Mayersohn, a former tech executive.
But the promise of limitless inventory is part of why he
bought the shop in 2008, and he thinks it will help
booksellers thrive.
The store charges authors a $70 set-up fee and $10 per
copy for a 200-page book, with discounts for volume. Customers
often print books of home recipes, family diaries, or academic
theses. One title, a memoir about growing up under
Mussolini, became a store bestseller.
For writers whom Epstein would have been unlikely to
publish at Random House, his machine is liberating. Alexander
says he's done querying publishers. He plans to print 200
copies of his novel, "Expectant Journey," in Darien to sell on
his own. "If a publisher reads it and likes it," he
says, "then they will pick it up."
To contact the reporter on this story: John Tozzi at
jtozzi2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick
Leiber at nleiber@bloomberg.net
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