On Demand Printing - The Solution to the High Cost of Textbooks?

On Demand Books, a New York company, has recently announced the second version of their Espresso Book Machine. This machine is designed to print books on-demand from PDF files. At 112 pages per minute, it prints pages and a cover, trims them, and then binds it all into a high quality paperback book. This all takes place while you are sipping a latte (or your beverage of choice). The machine can generate books from 40 to 830 pages in length at a cost of about one penny per page. You can find full details of the Espresso Book Machine in this article from Book Business magazine.

Widespread use of on-demand book publishing machines would reduce costs for book publishers. There would be no need for the book publishers to incur shipping costs to ship books to bookstores. Publishers wouldn’t have to guess about the demand for a book and possibly print extra copies that are never sold. And the large warehouses that publishers currently have to house their printed books while they await shipments to retailers would no longer be required.

Bookstores should also reap considerable savings. Bookstores would not need to tie up large sums of money by keeping thousands of books in inventory. There would never be any unsold books to return to the publisher (which saves shipping expenses). And bookstores could be much smaller as they would only need to house a few of these machines instead of rows of shelves for printed books. However, the bookstore cost savings would be offset by the need for the bookstores to stock the paper and printing supplies to print the books.

All of these factors might allow books to be sold at lower prices. The reason that on-demand printing hasn’t been popular so far is that it hasn’t been fast enough or cost-effective enough to replace pre-printing books. But with the introduction of the Espresso Book Machine 2.0, these problems look like they may have been solved. This could be a boon for students if it allows for reductions in the cost of textbooks.

Check out this video of the Espresso Book Machine 2.0 in action!