As we have seen Apple (and to a lesser extent its direct competitors) bury its old-fashioned record label competitors, I think the print media industry is due for a similar (if smaller) revolution.
There's probably nobody more frustrated by these sudden book shortages than the books' authors themselves. Being out of stock during the sweet spot of this year too often means the book sale will never be made.
I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in tiny distributed shops around the country, the operative idea being that instead of waiting six weeks for the next containerload of today's bestseller/tomorrow's pulp, whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.
Making a book (a real book) takes more than your $39 Deskjet, but it's not hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.
A single command line argument could convert a PDF to a perfect-bound novel or textbook, indistinguishable from the factories that produce books by the containerload but in massive MOQ's and haphazard sales and proof processes.
Even if it costs $15 instead of $12 to print bestseller copy number n+1, that's still plenty of money left on the table if you're at the mercy of a massive 20th-century pulp mill in a different time zone, who can't be bothered with your last minute business.
That best-seller for the price of $12 is based on thousands of copies, many times printed in china and shipped by container loads. There's no way you can make it for a few dollars more for short run and survive the business.
>it's not hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.
Yes its not difficult but if it is not capital intensive, it will most certainly be labor intensive. Printed through a digital copier, collated, perfect bound and trimmed in one process is not the issue. Having it done "ultra cheap one-off" is and any printer small or large will tell you the same.
The idea seems simple but no one is willing to do this for free or at a loss.
That best-seller for the price of $12 is based on thousands of copies, many times printed in china and shipped by container loads.
I think this is key. I'm quite disappointed that the NYT didn't mention China in the article.
A lot of high volume stuff is printed in China and takes the slow boat here. Domestic printers couldn't compete on price with that. So now they no longer have the onshore capability to print large numbers of books here.
This is Economics 101.
The article literally says “All of the sudden, there’s just no capacity”, and follows with "One large printing company, Edward Brothers Malloy, shut down this summer."
Well, duh. The publishers switched to printing in China. So what the fuck were domestic printers supposed to do?
>I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in tiny distributed shops around the country, [...] , whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.
• Instead of trying to build a robot to do everything, it's still a largely manual process, using low-priced labor (think a trailer out in the boonies with a disabled retiree running the thing content to get paid by the piece, versus a young urbanite who won't stay in the job)
• Doesn't depend on convincing authors to take on a second distribution channel that could compete with their first. BN's business model is predicated on large book runs, so it was always an uphill battle to get their suppliers to get on board. Imagine iTunes could only sell 20% of the music on the market and now imagine you have a bookmaking robot taking up $20/sf floorspace with the same limitation.
• Books produced with the distributed process are indistinguishable from the mass-produced variety, making the choice to switch quite easy for customers, since they can't tell the difference (other than one is in stock and one isn't).
• An "Espresso" machine would be largely for printing titles the store wouldn't stock (there's a reason they don't stock them: they wouldn't sell that well if they did). My approach would be largely for printing titles the store can't keep in stock. BN isn't in the printing business and that's getting to be a larger Achilles heel for their business model.
I'd love to know more about this project.. having worked for a local independent bookshop for a dozen years i've seen a lot of folks impatiently waiting for books to print and ship.
How do you propose to get access to the contents from the publishers? What will convince Penguin Randomhouse to have me have a copy of a bestseller in electronic form on a local device I can use to print copies?!
I know I can access a huge amount of titles that are in the public domain, or even as e-books... which might be convertible and printable on such a device, but that means the reseller needs a better deal on e-books to make money, or charge the client twice for the privilege of owning the book in physical form. Once for the content and once for the printed version.
In the end, the publishers have to exercise that control, by not putting all their eggs in one basket with a print house.
Most authors are so put off by the entire publication process that they won't be bothered by this, even if this takes some of the pain away (because now they'll have to put all their eggs in a basket that supports this approach). But as a few early adopters start realizing the advantages, companies like Penguin RandomHouse or more likely Amazon will acquire/start their own satellite JIT facilities to keep the cream from getting skimmed off their holiday booksales numbers, offering them as an included supplement to their existing print house system.
That doesn't help a bookshop's customers today when a troglodyte writes an out-of-stock bestseller and doesn't have the fortitude to call in the last minute specialist press. For some (thinking the latest fad diet books and political bestsellers in particular), they can wait.
If you want to learn more, email me (it's in my profile).
It would be cool if we could have like a small bookstore that prints out the book for you kind of like an apple store or like a subway. You could watch your book being put together and be printed.
Run full out, it really depends on the printer, but the printers I employ can do about 20ppm double-sided. But as books are numbered, each sheet of paper ends up becoming 4 pages. So an 800 page book (close to the largest you can print without getting really exotic) thus only takes about 10 minutes of a printer's time. A more conventional 200 page book would be 2 1/2 minutes.
There's additional labor to putting the book together besides babysitting a laser printer, but if you come up with a good process, there's probably more idle capacity than will be needed at all the busiest times of the year. A microbinder might find himself or herself like a uber driver- spending the money on the equipment and renting the space, but waiting for runs, subject to the market.
Replace "PDF"/"Books" with "PNG"/"Photographs", or "MP3"/"Recordings", and you'll see how well that argument went over. One should make the argument via YouTube to double the irony.
A group of hipster book snobs jealously guarding their century-old first editions are welcome to their hobby, but the mass media will blow right past them as soon as the economics are favorable. What's remarkable is how much more sophisticated 35mm film and vinyl are versus the old staid book.
Why now? Consumers are getting fussier (I want what's hot now, not in 8 weeks), and production equipment is getting way cheaper. Laser printing costs (even quasi-consumer-level) have plummeted to the point where equipment manufacturers have to resort to gimmickry to keep their margins positive. While all the paper textbooks you've read to date probably originated roll-to-roll, I see laser (and the flexibility it offers) finally breaking into that market.
Youtube did the job right for sure, I agree with you there but not with a similar jest for PDF/books equivalence. Youtube killed cassettes, CDs and all other offline forms of video: on plastic and also over a format file saved on a disk. PDF is like those .wmp Windows Media Player video files that no one has the time or interest to download and then read on.
Sure it works among techies because a good alternative has not existed but the real market of book doesn't consume PDFs or ePubs. They don't understand those, and don't appear to care because it is bad un-relatable experience to begin with.
There's probably nobody more frustrated by these sudden book shortages than the books' authors themselves. Being out of stock during the sweet spot of this year too often means the book sale will never be made.
I'm working on a microbindery, which involves ultracheap one-off book runs in tiny distributed shops around the country, the operative idea being that instead of waiting six weeks for the next containerload of today's bestseller/tomorrow's pulp, whatever's out of stock can simply be knocked out in three hours and either picked up or mailed a short distance.
Making a book (a real book) takes more than your $39 Deskjet, but it's not hard, or all that capital- or even labor-intensive.
A single command line argument could convert a PDF to a perfect-bound novel or textbook, indistinguishable from the factories that produce books by the containerload but in massive MOQ's and haphazard sales and proof processes.
Even if it costs $15 instead of $12 to print bestseller copy number n+1, that's still plenty of money left on the table if you're at the mercy of a massive 20th-century pulp mill in a different time zone, who can't be bothered with your last minute business.