Google Book Search goes with Print on Demand
By Paul Biba
I find this really exciting. According to Wired Epicenter:
… Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.
Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.) …
On Demand Books suggests that book stores price the books at about $8, leaving retailers with a $3 profit after both Google and On Demand Books collect a buck-a-book fee. Google plans to donate its share to a yet-unspecified charity, which might be a reaction to its messy legal and public policy fight over a copyright settlement that covers books that are still in copyright. (All the books that are being added to On Demand Books repertoire in this agreement are out of copyright in the country where it will be printed.)
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Paul Biba, publishing, TeleRead, Print on demand
September 17th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Have the texts been proofread, one wonders?
September 17th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
Most likely they would just use the non-OCR’d scans of the books, the way that Public Domain Reprints does.