Reading Local Seattle

{ Book Espresso Machine at Village Books (photo Lindsey Otta) }

This fall, three bookstores in the Pacific Northwest (Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island, and Village Books in Fairhaven) will be able to provide you nearly any book currently in stock with the countries largest digital book distributor, Ingram, or from the millions of archival books that have been digitized by Google. Instead of the three or four weeks required to special order a hard-to-find book, these stores will be able to provide a book in the length of time that it takes to order a cup of coffee and drink it. They will do this using a print-on-demand machine called the Book Espresso Machine.

Yet, another advantage of independent bookstores besides long term employees who know books, is that they are typically small to medium businesses who can adopt technology earlier and tailor new technologies to fit the local needs of their customers. The Book Espresso Machine promises not only to immediately provide access to backlist books, but also to transform each bookstore into mini-publishers. Both Third Place and Village Books have their own store-brand publishing imprints in the works.

The Book Espresso Machine is capable of producing a trade paperback book in five to ten minutes. It has essentially has four different components. The first is a high-speed digital photocopier capable of producing offset quality (or higher) black and white text for the book body. The second is a color photocopier capable of producing high-resolution color images. The third is a book trimmer and binder that wraps the cover over the body block, binds, and trims the book. And fourth is a desktop computer running software that oversees the entire process and communicates with EspressNet to grab the digital computer files necessary to produce the book.

The book that is produced using this method is produced on a photocopier that uses a different technology than traditional printing. For the black and white portion of the book, a digital photocopier can produce much finer resolution than an analog offset. The color image is produced using computer monitor colors, Red, Green, Blue (RGB), instead of the Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black (CMYK) that at one time required four different press passes to make an image. The fidelity of the color, then, is not one hundred percent. Thus, if you held two editions of the books next to each, one produced via print-on-demand and the other from what is called Web offset printing (a traditional print method) you would spot the difference.

But, many books that are already on bookstore shelves are already being created by print-on-demand technology. Random House and Faber have been a pioneer in using the technology to keep their books in print. A book in the backlist can be provided by print-on-demand at little cost. Many small presses and university presses too use print-on-demand to print short print runs. If you regularly buy small press, university, or “hard to find” titles, it is likely you already own print-on-demand titles and may not even know it.

I asked some writers what they thought about the Book Espresso Machine, and most were puzzled, or if they had heard about it, concerned about the quality of the book. Ron Dakon, author of Hammers and Mantids, said, ”I asked for a ristretto Apollinaire and I got a godawful caramel Bukowski macchiato.” The speed of changes for writers has been numbing in the last three or four years. When a novelist considers that it might take five or ten years to write a book, at the current rate of change, there is no telling what the retail book world will look like by the time they finish their novel.

Robert Sindelar at Third Place pointed out that mass-produced books do not necessarily equal quality printing. Paper stock in mass-produced books can include newsprint or other low-grade papers. Digital printers require well-constructed paper to get pulled through the printer. Furthermore, each individual copy is being observed by a press operator. There is an immediate involvement in the production process of creating on-demands books in the bookstore that is actually related to a barista pulling a shot of espresso.

Matthew Stadler, the Portland novelist,  launched the Publication Studio in Portland this last year designed around this point of connection between the author of a book, the physical production of the book, and the reader. Stadler noted that each machine that he has used produces a slightly different book. Each operator creates a slightly different product. The Publication Studio celebrates the lack of uniformity, the fact that the books are something other than mass-produced books. They are in fact produced one at a time, “on-demand,” when customers want a book. Stadler plans to use a random image (“safe image”) from the Web for the cover of the studio’s books.

Michael Lieberman of Seattle’s rare-book dealer, Wessel and Lieberman, was enthusiastic about the prospect of print-on-demand machines. For one thing, Lieberman pointed out, for many books there are only a limited number of physical copies. The machine makes these books more available, but simultaneously makes the actual, original book more valuable. “There is only one original,” he noted. He was also enthusiastic about the possibility of the machine to support the book arts. Instead of producing a book in the five or ten minutes of the Book Espresso Machine model, an artist could take hours or even a week and integrate the book with a craftsperson’s care and attention to detail and materials.

From a production standpoint, the machine is exciting, but both Chuck Robinson the owner of Village Books and Robert Sindelar, Partner at Third Place, pointed out that the operative word for the print-on-demand machine is demand. For Rob, he sees the machine providing an invaluable access to the vast library of hard-to-find, out-of-print, or backlist books that would have to be special ordered. Before, a customer would hear that they had to wait three weeks for a book to be special ordered, and now they only have to wait five or ten minutes. They can go get a cup of coffee and come back to pick up their book.

Rob was pretty practical about the Book Espresso Machine. He was clearly excited, not fearful, about having it in his store. He didn’t know what it would mean in the long run, but right now it means he can also provide the kind of oddly instantaneous gratification that people associate with digital information, and Village Books can continue to keep books as physical objects. For Rob the retail space as a physical space is about the physicality of the book. He was unsure, for instance, how a bookstore could take part in ebooks consumed by ebook readers. He figures Third Place Books will sell them at some point, although he doesn’t yet understand how they might work with a retail store. This is the same problem music retailers have had with digital music. For now Third Place Books is focused on printed words on a page in bound books bought by a person in their store. This makes sense given Third Place Books is a new and used bookstore. Even the name Third Place contains an acknowledgment of the bookstore as a gathering place that is part of a physical place where people live, sleep, go to parks, and lug around books.

Chuck at Village Books, however, was more philosophical about the role of booksellers. “We provide access and help finding and buying information,” Chuck said. “Books happen to be the form that has been used up until recently. But ebooks and the print-on-demand machine are other methods seeking to solve the same problem.” Village Books will also begin selling ebooks in the store by selling Symti gift cards that allow for online access to ebooks.

In order to help readers find information Village Books has also started its own imprint, Chuckanut Editions, using the Book Espresso Machine. Their website already contains a range of services for the machine.

And this was another area where both stores had a keen awareness: the machine changes the store from a site of book consumption to a site of book production. Both stores already had projects in mind. They plan to release books that were important to their community of readers. Village Book has a press called Chuckanut Editions, and plans to release some books right away that are in-store bestsellers. They plan on publishing a story favorite, a local history, Birth, Death and Resurrection of Fairhaven by George Hunsby. Third Place, too, has plans to begin an imprint and work with authors who have an existing relationship with the store.

The first Book Espresso Machine in North America was installed at the University of Alberta. The company worked with them to work out some of the kinks. The University of Alberta paid back the cost of the machine within the first year, but this wasn’t through providing access to the back catalog. Instead, they found that the majority of use for the book machine was through small press and self-published authors. Now, the University of Alberta offers a range of services targeted at this audience. They offer proofreading, editing, and book design. Almost all the books printed at the University of Alberta are created by this audience.

“We will begin to work with this audience,” Rob said, “and I expect by next year that will be large part of our audience”. Chuck, too, was aware that they would be working with self-publishers and small presses. Both stores, though, weren’t quiet sure how it would work. When I talked to them, they were not yet capable  of processing requests. But Chuck pointed out that if a book is in the Book Espresso Machine system, it can be ordered just like any other book. Currently this includes books listed in EspressNet which draws its catalog from LightingSource, the print-on-demand arm of Ingram, the largest book distributor in the United States. EspressNet also draws public domain titles from Google Books. The online FAQ says a publisher can have their titles listed in EspressNet outside Lightning Source.

The presence of a print-on-demand machine in a store promises a number of things. For one thing, the expensive-to-maintain older stock of books is not necessary. If a copy of a book sells one copy a week, or even a copy a day, it can be delivered on-demand. Conversely, the barriers to having a book available for purchase in a bookstore dissolve. An author merely needs to have their book listed in EspressNet which costs less than having galleys printed and much less than an entire print run.

From the point of view of a writer trying to get in print this is a godsend. The old dictum, that freedom of the press only applies to those who own a press no longer holds. However, it only opens new problems. As any blogger already feels, there are easily more bloggers than readers of blogs. And this feeling is often shared by writers as well, there seem far more writers in the world than readers.

But from the point of view of a book consumer, a print-on-demand machine alongside ebooks creates the same cornucopia for literature that the music world has already been enjoying. I currently carry around more “records” in my front pocket than I ever owned before I had a digital music player. I can imagine this will be the case as well with digital books, where I can own a library in PDFs and for those books that really seem to require paper and ink, I can have them created at my local bookstore on nice paper stock.

Likely the Book Espresso Machine, digital books, well-designed ebook readers such as the Kindle, Sony eReader, and Nook are posed to create a cocktail that will at the very least make digital book delivery a standard method of consuming everything except books that require a specific type of expression on paper and board — a coffee table book, an art book, or limited edition letterpress book isn’t going to be replaced by an ebook — and best sellers. Best sellers will likely remain, because at large quantities printing is the cheapest way to manufacture something. Even silicon chips are printed. But, I suspect even best sellers and print-on-demand machines will eventually be absorbed by ebook readers as the devices become better and customers become used to them because distributing digital merchandise is cheaper than printing.

Predicting the future in business or what consumers will adopt is a notoriously difficult business. If it weren’t, all business would make desirable products, and Hollywood would only release movies that people wanted to see. It would have been improbable to predict that the espresso machine, an obscure appliance in coffee stores in the 1970s, would by the end of the 1980s lay the foundation for a new kind of retail store. The Book Espresso Machine will no doubt have profound effects on the selling of books.

Some of the effects may be that any book that isn’t selling more than a copy a week may only be available digitally. A store that stocks books in this way would have stacks of the latest bestseller by Dan Brown, Robert Patterson, and maybe a handful of recently created copies for writers who are coming into the store. The store, like a contemporary library, would have computer terminals were you could browse, order, or even create your own books. It would make money then from a variety of sources — ticket prices or room rentals, selling paper, providing support to self-publishers, and selling books. Already, bookstores make money in a variety of other ways such as selling gifts greeting cards, wrapping paper, t-shirts, and the bookless bookstore would continue this process of supporting an economy around the activity of books and reading rather than just selling books, just as Starbucks or a good independent coffee store sells a lot more than just coffee.

Author: Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs is the author of five books, including Shoot the Buffalo, a novel published by Clear Cut Press and winner of a 2006 American Book Award. His second novel, The Strong Man, will be released on March 1st 2010. Recent work has appeared in Spork, First Intensity, Seattle Magazine, and The Clackamas Literary Review.

Matt Briggs has written 78 articles for us.