A Turning Point for the Publishing Industry

Bookstores equipped with Espresso Book Machines can now print off individual books for sale on demand and in store.

On Sept. 22, in what I fully believe will become known as a historic turning point for the publishing industry, HarperCollins Publishers announced a new program called “Comprehensive Backlist,” which it will implement in partnership with On Demand Books, makers of the Espresso Book Machine (EBM).

The program will allow any physical bookstore with an EBM to offer thousands of backlist trade paperback titles from HarperCollins to their customers. This means that walking into your local bookstore only to find that the title you want is out of stock and that you’ll have to wait anywhere from one to three weeks for that special order to arrive could soon become a thing of the past.

Now, all the bookseller will need to do is look up the title in the EBM catalogue, hit a few buttons, and a perfectly bound trade paperback version, complete with a full-colour cover, will be produced right there in the store in a matter of minutes.

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This represents the very dream I had when I set about to purchase an Espresso Book Machine for the bookstore at McMaster University back in 2008. Titles Bookstore acquired an EBM, but, even though the catalogue of well over a million titles was immediately available, content from the major publishers was still part of the “coming soon” rather than the “feature attraction” section. Instead of waiting to see if that content would actually “come soon,” McMaster took a “buy it and they will come” approach, and hasn’t looked back.

The EBM at McMaster has allowed us to partner with academic publishers to ensure the availability of custom versions of textbooks. This has helped us save students hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past three years, while increasing bookstore and publisher sell-through. The EBM has also attracted an entirely new revenue stream due to our ability to offer services for self-publishing authors. With an ideal print-run of one copy, anybody who ever dreamed of publishing his or her own book saw some previously high barriers fall.

In the official press release announcing the new project, Brian Murray, CEO at HarperCollins, said: “Bookstores continue to be an important place for customers to shop for physical books. The goal of this initiative is to give the local bookseller the capability to provide customers with a greater selection of HarperCollins titles in a physical environment.”

Dane Neller, visionary CEO of On Demand Books, applauds HarperCollins on this move: “By committing thousands of titles to the program, HarperCollins is showing its clear support for bookstores and authors, and reaching more readers.” Neller goes on to state that “Digital-to-Print at Retail” services will become a powerful new sales channel, helping to reduce the loss of sales that currently results from out-of-stock inventory.

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This is a day that I dreamed of when I first watched the EBM roll into the bookstore at McMaster University in November 2008. I knew that digital books and e-books would continue to grow in popularity and availability, and that they would eventually become a dominant force within the publishing market. But I have also long held the belief that there is a need for digital distribution with a “print local” element – giving customers who still prefer to purchase printed books from their friendly neighbourhood bookshops an easy way to access more titles than can be physically held in a small and often high-rent retail space.

Attempting to stock upwards of 100,000 titles on their shelves is not always a fully sustainable business model for bookstores. The McMaster bookstore, for example, which used to keep 40,000 titles in stock, eventually recognized that the cost of doing so was simply not justifiable. It was the Espresso Book Machine and the continually growing digital catalogue of print-on-demand titles that allowed us to finally make the change and stop carrying so much overstock. We knew that the day would come when that backlist of titles would be available in a more convenient fashion thanks to our Espresso Book Machine.

Now that HarperCollins has stepped up to the plate, I’m confident that the other major publishing stakeholders will follow suit. This is a winning opportunity for publishers, authors, bookstores, and customers, and one that will profoundly impact the industry as we know it.

A version of this post originally appeared here.