Bookstore brewing books on demand
November 2, 2007 - Edmonton - The University of Alberta Bookstore is serving up a whole lot of Espresso - but not in a cup. Its brand-new Espresso Book Machine - one of four in the world and the only one in Canada, began churning out custom-ordered books today.
Manufactured by On Demand Books and named one of the best inventions of the year by Time magazine, Espresso prints as many as four books every two minutes - offering digital reprints of out-of-print or self-published books at a fraction of the price charged by publishers.
"One advantage of having this is that we're able to offer savings to students," said Bookstore manager Todd Anderson. Publishers will, for example, produce custom editions of textbooks that contain, say, 10 of 15 chapters, if that is all a certain course requires. The 10-chapter version costs less than the original but requires an eight-week wait, still needs to be printed, bound and shipped - and then there are the inherent risks like the return of unsold books.
Using Espresso, Anderson says, publishers can simply send pdf files to the Bookstore, which will print the books, pay royalties to the publisher and deliver the books to students. "And our lead time is two minutes - not eight weeks."
Anderson points to a $52 electrical engineering textbook as an example. "This book costs 26 cents per page but we can produce it, pay royalties and have it on the shelves for about 12 cents a page.
Espresso also puts rare, out-of-print and custom-designed books into the hands of consumers in minutes.
Today, Anderson was printing off copies of a book entitled Guide and Companion to Edmonton Alberta: A hand book for everybody: for residents, tourists, intending settlers and others. Originally published in 1909, a year after the U of A was established, the book holds valuable historic information.
"The only way you can get your hands on this is to go to the Special Collections library at Rutherford and maybe get them to give you a pair of white gloves so you can look at it - or you can get your own copy of it here," he said, adding that Espresso allows the Bookstore to do custom print jobs as well.
"All of Shakespeare's works are in the public domain. So if you want a book of only the tragedies, we can do that. And if a professor wants to build some comments into it, we can do that too, so in a way, we've become a publisher."
The Bookstore, Anderson added, has access to 288,000 digital books Espresso can print, and is working to expand that collection.
The U of A is the only bookstore in the world to operate one of four Espresso Machines on the market: One is at the World Bank in Washington, DC; another is at Egypt's Library of Alexandria, and another at the New York Public Library.
Related Internal Links
Related External Links
Reader Responses to this Article
by Tomasz Lang
Nov 02, 2007
