Tom Benjey's Weblog

While theEspresso Book Machine (EBM) was printing the book, the representative said that they received six to ten orders per week. Some of these orders may be for a single copy of a book but others can be for tens of copies. It seems that the machine is greatly underutilized at this time because the equipment is capable of printing thousands of books per month. In fact, the minimum usage for ExpressNet, the software that connects the EBM to book print files from a variety of sources, is 5,000 copies a year. Download the files for fewer than 5,000 titles a year is viewed as underutilizing ExpressNet. If I understand correctly, locally created books need not be uploaded to ExpressNet to be printed on an EBM. Thus, an ExpressNet connection is not necessary but does limit the range of works available for printing on a particular EBM. One of the sources linked to by ExpressNet is Lightning Source (LSI). LSI is the digital print on demand arm of Ingram, the large book wholesaler. I am interested in this connection because the Pop Warner Single-Wing Trilogy is printed by LSI. Books printed by LSI are automatically available to almost all resellers of books both on and off-line. Now, I need to see how to make the Trilogy available to EBMs world-wide, not that many people outside the U.S. would be interested in it.

I assumed that UM professors who consider the textbooks in their heads to be better than those that are actually in print would see the opportunity to easily convert the books in their minds into physical form without having to convince a publisher to pay them to write the book. Professor-authors could then sell these books to captive buyers in the forms of their students. This hasn’t happened to any significant degree as yet, most likely because the idea hasn’t dawned on them yet apparently because most of them are unaware of the EBM’s existence and capabilities. When they do, grad students will be tasked with creating the PDFs to input to the machine. Whether professors will actually write the books or if that task will be delegated to grad students will vary on a case-by-case basis.

Tags: EBM, Espresso Book Machine, ExpressNet, University of Michigan

This entry was posted on November 15, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.