Print on demand technology allows even more authors to achieve their dream of producing a book.

When my bookstore purchased an Espresso Book Machine back in November 2008, we were following the lead of the University of Alberta bookstore. They were venturing into new territory with respect to the traditional bookselling industry and we wanted to be there too.

After all, owning a machine that promised access to literally millions of print on demand (POD) titles would be a wonderful way for a small independent bookstore to compete with the Amazons of the world. If they could ship in 24 hours, we could do it even better by getting the book into the customer’s hands in about 15 minutes.

So, more than a year later, here’s what we found.

We’ve saved students money, that’s for sure. When we bear the cost of printing a book on site, publishers usually give us an additional discount off the retail price. Typically, we would pay an academic publisher $80 for a $100 textbook. But when we produce it ourselves, we pay somewhere in the realm of $60. And because our mandate is to aid the academic process, we pass those additional savings along to the students. So, after paying for the printing cost, we can usually sell the book for $80 – 20 per cent less than the original textbook price.

We’ve also made professors happy by working with authors and publishers to get access to out of print material.

But where have we made money?

It certainly hasn’t been in the millions of POD titles instantly available, because, as of the writing of this, that catalog still isn’t available in Canada in anything more than a “test mode.”

Instead, our Espresso Book Machine has mostly been used to help new authors achieve their dream of publishing a book.

I’m going to purposely ignore the ongoing debates of whether or not self-publishing is good and whether or not writers should consider it. Ultimately, it’s a personal choice that each writer makes. In my experience of working with various self-published authors, it has been an extremely worthwhile endeavour – both for the author and for my bookstore.

Using POD technology offers two distinct advantages to self-published authors. First, the initial setup cost and required print quantity is low. At our store, the minimum order is a single copy, and that’s the way we prefer it. After all, the machine is designed specifically to do one-off books, not to mass-produce a huge print-run.

Second, since we’re a bookstore and we’re all about selling books, the author doesn’t have to pre-print their books and pitch them on consignment to outlets. Instead, we give them the option of making the books they produce on our EBM available in the store. And with the capability to ship the book worldwide, we can become a convenient distribution method. For any book they sell, we pay them the difference between their print cost and whatever retail price they set. That means there is no up-front cost for the author, giving them an additional way of making their investment money back.

To see the proud smiles on the faces of the authors who get to watch one of their books beig produced right in front of them is truly something priceless. The only downside is that we’re having trouble keeping up with the overwhelming demand of everyone with the dream of publishing a book.