Espresso, Anyone?

The group that gathered last Thursday at New York Public Library’s Science Industry and Business Library for the unveiling of former Random House honcho and by now industry curmudgeon/visionary Jason Epstein’s Espresso Book Machine was not large. Nor was it comprised of many of the industry types who are "supposed" to be high tech and cutting edge and into gadgets (read: under 40). Instead, most of the two dozen or so reporters, publishing watchers and friends who showed up at 34th street at 8:30 a.m. were middle-aged and up, and most seemed to know a bit about what they were about to see. Epstein has, after all, not been exactly quiet about his belief that Print on Demand to consumers is the future of bookselling; he has been writing and speaking about it for years.

And he spoke about it again, in a somewhat halting prepared speech that was whittled down from an earlier, longer paper he delivered elsewhere earlier this month. His basic points: fearful publishing folk are focusing too much attention on the idea of e-books, which he believes (and I agree) will be the whole market soon, but only for reference, hard science and similar nonfiction. (Even cookbooks, he says, will increasingly be delivered digitally – in the longer speech he alluded to the idea of a flat screen on refrigerator doors – which will make cooking more efficient, but less joyful to the serious cook (like him) who reads cookbooks for pleasure and appreciates the serendipity of happening on to new ideas. ) But Print On Demand – by which you can order any book that exists digitally and have it specially printed and delivered to you in just a few minutes -- is the revolution "already underway" for everything else. His cofounder – former Dean & Deluca CEO Dane Neller – explained during the brief Q&A that ultimately, the Espresso machine is a delivery system and that their company, OnDemand Books, is expecting to license, not sell, the medium-sized-closet devices to retailers, libraries and even hotels.

Neller declined to give details about how much and whom would be paid for books still in copyright – "we respect intellectual property," he said – but responded positively, almost chirpily, to a question about how publishers are reacting to all this. "Very well," he said, and since there were just about no publishers in the audience, it would be hard either to verify or deny. But I was struck by how easy-peasy he made the whole thing seem, even by press conference standards. Is the copyright issue not hugely central to this discussion? To judge from the wrangling that was taking place just a few weeks back between S&S and the Authors’ Guild you’d have to assume so.

Still, it seems that should the Espresso Book Machine really gather, uh, steam, it is the the booksellers who will be most effected. On the positive side, they won’t have to stock and ship low-selling titles and can thus cut their overhead significantly; but at the same time, if you can download any title you want from your computer to your neighborhood bank or copy center, why would you need bookstores?

We’re not there yet, of course, despite the impressive contraption that produced a paperback copy of Christopher Anderson’s The Long Tail in three minutes (albeit with an imperfectly sized cover). OnDemand currently has beta versions of the Espresso in such bookstore-challenged places as Russia and Egypt and is planning to install several more in Alberta, Canada and in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. As for bookstores, so far the only one signed up is the Northshire in Manchester, Vermont, a store known for its foresightedness and innovation. So maybe there’s something to this insta-book machine...but it’ll be at least a few years until we know for sure.

____________________________________________

Sara Nelson is Editor in Chief of Publishers Weekly: The International Voice for Book Publishing and Bookselling. You can read all of Sara's weekly Gather columns at saranelson.gather.com. And for more of Sara's columns click here.