This year, I was unable to attend BEA – which is a shame, because I enjoy a long series of parties, eating / sleeping / breathing / talking / touching / reading books, getting with people I mostly only interact with on-line, and seeing how the big publishers are throwing money out the porthole of the Titanic. While I wasn’t there, it sounded like pretty much the same old thing, wrapped in pretty paper. Everything old is new again, and again and again.
Take the Espresso Book Machine. This was rolled out years ago as the Coming of the Book Messiah. And then sank under it’s own Rube-Goldbergian weight. Or the half-step I saw one NCIBA from National Geographic, that was going to personalize books AND print it out in the store. Yes, it’s fun and tricksy. But what’s it FOR?
Here are the hits against it:
BOOKSTORES: If the only way you can get a book is from this machine, then there is no need for a bookstore. Especially an indie bookstore. To an already threatened line of retail, this wee beastie is a pretty serious threat.
PUBLISHERS: What’s the cost per book ? Economies of scale work both ways: the more books you print, the less per unit it is. If you are only printing onesies, the cost per book is going to be pretty high. While there are no transport costs, the item is going to cost twice as much as an offset-printed, shipped book. LSI (Lightning Source International, the POD printing arm of Ingram) is quite a bit more per book already. And then there’s the returns problem. Can a purpose-printed book be taken back? Will the Espresso eat returns and recycle them into new books?
CONSUMER: Printed books will be more expensive – in the same way many POD books are expensive. Everyone has to make their money – the author, the publisher, whoever is giving over retail space to host the machine. So there will certainly be a premium on that. Right now, many LSI-printed books are priced at upwards of $20+. More expensive than a movie ticket, a download of music/movie/e-book. This tends to make books into a luxury entertainment item. Not good for the growth of an industry in a shrinking envioronment.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a big fan of cool tech. And I still think that newspapers could be saved by a specialized personally-printed daily edition, a la Babylon 5’s “Universe Today.” But I just don’t see it happening for books.
I think a blend of e-books and short-run p-books is the way things will go for the near future. No one’s clear on what will happen in 5 years. That’s both exciting and terrifying.
Where do you think publishing will go from here?
© Jacqueline Church Simonds 2009
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Jun 1 09 10:59 am
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to where publishing is going, but dismissing on-demand printing and inventory-free publishing as non-viable is shortsighted, in my experience-based opinion.
The price per copy is only ONE factor that needs to be taken into consideration when discussing the entire publishing chain, author to publisher to bookseller. If you don’t include the cost of shipping and warehousing those offset-printed books in that per-copy, then you aren’t looking at the actual cost of each book.
The purpose of the EBM isn’t to replace bookstores. It’s to give bookstores access to large numbers of titles they can’t afford to stock. One of the major advantages the chains and online sellers have is that they can offer hundreds of thousands of titles. As long as those titles were made available digitally, small bookstores could have that same level of capacity, because any book the customer wanted can be printed right there, right this minute.
In other words, instead of taking an order and having the customer wait 5-7 days for their book, they can make a sale and the customer only waits 5-7 minutes. And no need to return the book because the customer ordered it then went home and bought it on Amazon because they would get it in two days.
As for returns, they have to end. Period. The publishing industry is no longer in any condition to continue subsidizing bookstores, and the sooner it stops the better. The policy is environmentally unsound as well as economically foolish. Worse, if it does continue then I foresee book prices even for offset runs increasing, as they already have, to compensate for the volume of unsold books being shipped back.
Furthermore, the EBM would allow booksellers to offer printing services to locals who just want a few copies of Mom’s recipes or their own memoir, thus providing a new adjunct revenue stream.
Finally, by placing EBMs overseas, those consumers will have access to titles at reasonable prices without having to pay the horrendous shipping charges that in most cases are equal to 50% or more of the cover price. That means authors and publishers will not only have access to additional markets but will be able to compete in them.
If LSI books are priced $20+, that’s because the publisher has opted for a higher return per copy instead of thinking in terms of volume. I have one book that’s priced at $23, and it’s nearly 600 pages long. The rest fall mainly between $15 and $17. You can compete on price and likely sell more books or you can overprice and hope to sell books.
I honestly wish people who don’t utilize inventory-free publishing wouldn’t offer their opinions as if they had some basis in fact. I don’t say that to be confrontational. It’s just that this is how misinformation gets spread, and the more it spreads the more it takes on the patina of reality. Which it isn’t.
Jun 1 09 11:26 am
“I honestly wish people who don’t utilize inventory-free publishing wouldn’t offer their opinions as if they had some basis in fact.”
I have not dismissed non-inventory publishing. I am saying this machine everyone is all excited about is the same thing they were peddling 5 years ago and it went pretty much no where. That’s reality. Dressing it up and saying it’s the next new thing is as ridiculous as saying Newt Gingrich is the face of the New Republican party. Seriously laughable.
The bulk of the publishing industry is based on inventory publishing – and filled with people who have been in business for a lot longer than a couple of years. So you WILL get contrary opinions, meant confrontationally or not.
I have studied non-inventory models very thoroughly. While it works for some business models (micro-publishing and big publishing back-list titles), it does not work for all.
Returns will not go away because you (or I) will it. They might go away if most indie bookstores fail (a distinct possibility) and the big box stores go to a price reduction model (clearance sales). But it also guarantees that no bookstore will take a chance on a small press or subsidy-published author. In that case, the Espresso makes a little sense, but it’s still a sledgehammer approach (most small bookstores can’t afford $35k to buy or $1500 a month lease. They can barely pay the light bill). Note that the one bookstore who has used it successfully says it is mostly used to print out grandma’s cookbook and memoirs. That’s not publishing. That’s producing 1 book. The equivelent of scrapbooking.
I am not feeling reassured that the creators say the cost is the same as a POD book. How is that possible? It’s like Google telling us stealing our book content will help the publisher sell the book. Never buy a shirt from a naked man. Something’s wrong with that picture.
I agree that there is no one-size fits-all future for publishing apparent right now. And while no/low inventory may be the Holy Grail, it’s still not proved-out yet. The price per unit is still very high. There’s no way I can recoup my investment in a reasonable amount of time with the teensy bit of margin I get from the POD model from a “right price” title. There’s got to be some way to do low inventory and get a better margin, or publishing is pretty much screwed. And there’s no way an author can pack an auditorium the way music stars are (that’s the way the music biz makes money now – not from “album” sales).
I know I don’t have all the answers. And I know the road to hubris is littered with the bodies of those who asserted they knew absolutely what the future would be. I’m just trying to find something that works. The Espresso ain’t it.
Jun 13 09 9:50 am
I really like your post. Does it copyright protected?
Jun 13 09 10:29 am
You must assume that all material you find on the web is copyrighted.
You may use some of my post with attribution (meaning you say that it is by Jacqueline Church Simonds on the Small Press World Blog) with a link if you like.
Jun 14 09 6:36 pm
Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting
Jun 15 09 6:18 pm
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
Jun 16 09 8:13 am
Hi Gary,
I’m glad you liked the post. I am very involved with all aspects of the publishing world, so I will be covering all sorts of aspects thereto.