In April Amazon UK said they had “no plans” to bring BookSurge’s print-on-demand services to the UK, but they also hedged their bets by noting “we do not comment on future plans.” Now they have very concrete plans for a POD program, and the company says publishers who will participate include Harper UK, Cambridge University Press, Wiley, and Faber & Faber. Their ambition, according to vp of media Chris North, is “to bring hundreds of thousands of books to Amazon.co.uk’s customers that might never have otherwise been available.” The company has not disclosed their vendor for the printing, which will […]
POD
Michigan Adds Espresso Book Machine
The University of Michigan has installed a machine from On Demand to print their own books one at a time, drawing on their collection of digitized out-of-copyright books, thanks to Google. They say its costs about ten dollars a book, and “the service is available to researchers, students and the public.” In the announcement, Michigan notes that their libraries have digitized “nearly 2 million books” since 1996.UofM post
Designers Craft Digital Print Demo Book
Are you curious about the printing capabilities of digital printing? Prof. Frank Philippin at Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany and British designer James Goggin worked with graphic design students in a two-day workshop to create DEAR LULU, a test book that “acts as a calibration document for testing color, pattern, format, texture and typography. Exercises in color profile (Adobe RGB/sRGB/CMYK/Greyscale), halftoning, point size, line, geometry, skin tone, colour texture, cropping and print finishing provide useful data for other designers and self-publishers to judge the possibilities and quality of online print-on-demand — specifically Lulu.com, with this edition.” The book sells, via Lulu […]
ABA to Partner with Applewood on POD
I love the tidbit via Vermont Public Radio that, despite publishing world dreams that a POD book machine within a bookstore will make available countless titles efficiently to individual customers, what those customers really want is to make their own books. There is, potentially, huge opportunity there for physical bookstores, since the dozens of web sites that offer such services don’t have their own retail outlets. The bookstore is a natural place to go for help in publishing your own book (and if you buy the right package, they’ll put it on sale for you, too.) I’ve noted in speeches […]