Books used to be simple paper blocks that you could buy only at bookstores. Sometimes the store had what you wanted. Sometimes you had to wait. Maybe for one day. Maybe for ninety.
But the Internet changed all that. The old distribution patterns were the first to go as online bookstores began delivering in a few days nearly anything in print. And now, even the idea of “in print” is up for grabs. No one — save a handful of tiny, artsy-craftsy publishers — sets books in type by hand anymore. Computers have taken over book production. Given, then, that every book published nowadays exists at some point as an electronic file, why must books pass out of print? Indeed, why must they be printed at all?
For the last decade, the dream of turning books into electronic gadgets has haunted cyber-geeks. And now, it is about to become a reality. This month, the first portable hand-held reading devices hit the market — complete with a high-speed modem for downloading finished text.
Even more likely to reform the book-publishing industry is a new method of manufacturing, known as “digital printing” or “print on demand,” in which an electronic text may be printed at any time, in any quantity — down to a single copy of the book.
Both these alternatives to traditional publishing are dependent on the Internet — or rather, on the supposed fact that average readers have incorporated the Internet into their lives. Together, they promise nirvana for readers: instant access to books, even titles long out of print.
An “e-book” created by SoftBook Press was prominently displayed at the electronic-book workshop held in October by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Text appears page by page, as in a book, rather than scrolled continuously, as on a computer monitor. The screen is backlit for reading in dim light and allows note-taking, book-marking, and searching. From a company website, users access published books or private documents stored by their business. The SoftBook costs a steep $ 299 with a commitment to buy $ 19.95 worth of text every month for the next two years. Without the content agreement, the price rises to an even steeper $ 599.
The “Rocket Book,” backed by Bertelsmann (now, since its merger with Random House, the largest publisher in the world), is designed for the individual reader — the wealthy individual reader: The Christmas edition of Levenger’s popular, high-end catalogue lists it for $ 499, plus $ 119 for a snazzy leather case. Other manufacturers are aiming at such niche markets as college textbooks. Some want e-books to incorporate pagers, e-mail, cell phones, and appointment books. But even while e-book creators are involved in cutthroat competition, they are edging toward the thing they need to make their competition meaningful: a standard for the industry. At the October conference, repeated reference was made to the VHS-Beta videotape war of the early 1980s, in which consumers loyal to the superior but defeated Beta standard were left at last with nothing to watch. As long as potential consumers fear that their e-books may not read all the books that exist in electronic form, they won’t buy the devices.
The idea of a book as electronic file rather than a block of paper will take a while to catch on, and digital printing — the turning of those electronic files into printed books at the customer’s whim — may prove the intermediate step. The typical book today, printed on an offset press, has a surprisingly short life. At Yale University Press, for example, a book begins with a hardcover run of two thousand. After about two years, the book goes back to press for a paperback run of another two thousand copies. When sales drop below three hundred copies a year, the book is given a last run of a thousand copies. And when those are gone, the book is declared out of print.
With digital printing, however, a book never goes out of print. Stored on an electronic database, the book can easily be printed in the three-hundred-a-year runs that Yale takes as the cutoff for its offset press. The book can be printed as orders arrive, in runs of one, five, or ten copies.
Digital printing can produce such small quantities because the processes and costs differ from those of offset printing. With its “DocuTech” machines, Xerox has emerged as the leader in the new technology. But all such digital printers begin with digitized text, and, on machines equipped for paperback binding, the transition from electronic file to finished book can take as little as five minutes.
Offset printing has high “make-ready” costs for installing text plates, loading paper, and ensuring the proper “registration” of text on the page. For a three-hundred-page paperback, the make-ready cost is around $ 500 — with an additional one-time cost of about $ 1,000 for creating plates and transfer film.
In contrast, digital copiers require little pre-production. John Paeglow of Integrated Book Technologies says of his digital printers, “We can set the print engine ready to run in ten minutes.” Like an office copier, the machine needs paper, toner, and someone to make sure the image is properly on the page. Xerox’s print-on-demand division, Book In Time, charges fifteen cents a page for preparing a digital file, twenty-five cents for scanning in a hardcopy.
This low make-ready cost for digital printing looks like a bargain: a one-time charge between $ 45 and $ 75 for a three-hundred-page book. But subsequent costs begin to even things out. In offset printing, the printing costs 0.3 cents a page for a run of fifty thousand books, between 0.5 and 0.7 cents a page for a run of two thousand. A digital printing of the same book costs from 1 to 1.5 cents a page. The result for a three-hundred-page book, excluding paper and binding, is a post-make-ready production cost that starts at $ 1.50 for offset, and $ 3.00 for digital printing.
Large offset-print runs involve costs of storage and sales that digital printing may avoid. But digital printers are confronted by unexpected expenses derived from the low volume of books that is their apparent advantage. Each order exacts transaction costs: receiving the order, scheduling production, packing, and invoicing. These are the same whether the order is for two hundred copies or just one. “As run lengths go down to ten or five or even one copy, the cost of managing the transaction begins to dominate,” explains Mark Fleming, an industry consultant at Strategies on Demand in Naperville, Illinois. “In the extreme, you could have a situation in which it costs $ 10 to produce an order and $ 50 to process it.”
Similarly, maintenance for the new machines is expensive. Express Media, a Nashville digital printer, pays a fixed monthly maintenance fee plus a variable fee for each page printed. Offset presses create no such charges, and the larger companies can keep service personnel on staff. So too, digital machines require toner sold in expensive cartridges, while offset presses use ink inexpensive enough to be sold by the ton.
Some in the industry remain uninterested in print on demand. “I don’t really think it will affect us,” claims Hayward Cirker, president of Dover Publications, which prints about three hundred titles a year, the majority of them out-of-print or public-domain titles. “Publishing is advertising, selling, and promoting. If what they’re doing is fulfilling the demand without advertising, without promotion or anything else that goes along with publishing, it won’t interfere with genuine publishers.”
But others are pressing ahead. National Academy Press has used print on demand for five years. It seems to work, however, because demand for their books already exists.
“We are publishing for a market, rather than marketing a publication,” explains the firm’s Michael Jensen. Indeed, NAP’s success derives mostly from its being among the first publishers to harness the Internet. The NAP website allows viewers to read the entire text of books before they order — and, far from being threatened, sales have risen as a result, according to Jensen.
The Internet is not merely what makes the new technologies possible; it is also what seems to be making them mandatory. “If you can log on to the Internet and see that all these titles are available, it raises your expectation about getting them,” Mark Fleming claims. “That is putting pressure, for a refreshing change, on the distribution channel. Publishers, distributors, manufacturers, and retailers have to be able to deliver those titles in a relatively short amount of time.”
Distributors are already including digitally printed books in their listings. In May, Ingram, the nation’s largest book wholesaler, launched its print-on-demand division, Lightning Print, which now has about two hundred titles. Ingram senior vice-president Youngsuk Chi agrees that online bookstores have spurred print on demand: “All of this would never have happened if [the online book-stores] Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com had not made their search engines available for free.”
Other businesses are actively seeking public-domain and out-of-print titles to reprint digitally. Replica Books, the print-on-demand division of Baker & Taylor, the country’s second-largest book wholesaler, has the rights to about a hundred titles. “We are not in the business of printing ten thousand copies,” says vice-president Frank Daly. “We are a true on-demand business. We have no inventory.” Similarly, Vivisphere, an independent publishing house in Accord, New York, digitally reprints forgotten books by the likes of Erskine Cald-well and Elizabeth Spencer.
Random House, the largest American trade publisher, has treated print on demand in a different way. Judith Rossner approached Doubleday, a Random House imprint, when her novel Emmeline was adapted for an opera at Lincoln Center. Though the book was out of print, Doubleday published several hundred paperback copies for the gift shop at Lincoln Center and a Barnes & Noble bookstore hosting Rossner. “We see this as an opportunity to aid authors,” says Random House’s Stuart Applebaum. “Print on demand enables us to give a very focused redistribution on a number of titles for which there is particular demand.”
Not all industry analysts are so sure the new technologies aid authors. “A publisher, theoretically, could hold on to thousands of titles that it has no interest in,” points out Paul Aiken of the Authors Guild. “That situation would not be a good one for authors and would break the traditional deal between authors and publishers.” Therin Raines, literary agent for Cynthia Ozick and other authors, agrees: “How will you decide when a book is out of print? This will be a difficulty for us when negotiating with publishers.” The New York agent Richard Curtis has recently founded “E Rights,” a company devoted to helping authors cope with electronic copyrights.
There are strong disincentives for publishers to get involved in e-books. Internet sales could weaken hard-copy sales. So too, content posted on the Internet is easy prey for pirating. And publishers naturally dislike the costs of multiple formats — books duplicated as e-books, offset printings, and digital files.
On the new book technologies, the jury is not just out; it hasn’t seen the evidence. In both electronic books and print on demand, the technology must develop and costs must fall. But the bait that hooks consumers is more likely to be speed than low price. Digital printers can produce a book in minutes. E-books can download in seconds. If these systems prove effective, what now seems like lightning — the few days it takes to receive a book purchased online — will seem like the Pony Express.
Of course, to have it, we must stop thinking of books as those familiar, inked blocks of paper. And the result could be a book industry that at last revolves around what its customers want, instead of what it guesses its customers want. We need only sign on.
Pia Nordlinger is a reporter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
