Yes, it’s time for a Japanese toilet training video, with subtitles. Enjoy!

So let’s talk about Print on Demand (POD). POD printing could very well change everything about how we deal with books, in ways that the consistent promises of eBooks haven’t even truly started to.

Well how? That’s a long ride. But let’s see how far this gets for now.

First, some info:

Print on Demand (POD) - Technology that lets you print an item for a standard price, regardless of the size of the print run. The price per unit will always be higher, even at volume, than the price per unit of something printed via Offset Printing. However, in return for that price difference you gain the ability to do limited, or even single, runs of an item, which is not feasible through Offset Printing.

Offset Printing - The most common high volume printing technique in use today, offset features extremely consistent high quality, longevity of the printing plates themselves, and high volume output that gets cheaper with every major increase in run size. At smaller runs offset can be stupidly expensive. Generating the plates and running the machine costs the same regardless of run size. The price of materials used, however, go down with bulk. So while small print runs are not feasible, large print runs can see amazing price drops.

Espresso Book Machine - A POD printing machine owned and sold by On Demand Books (www.ondemandbooks.com). Espresso Book Machines are now being sold to libraries and retail stores in order to print books on demand for customers.

Lightning Source - The current leader of commercial POD. Lightning Source (www.lightningsource.com) is owned by Ingram Industries, Inc which is one of the major book distributors (Ingram Book Group, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, Inc.).

So now, thus armed, to the thinkin’!

Well shit in practical terms what does this all mean? I need to break this down but everything will run into each other so forgive it.

Well “out of print” takes on a whole new lack of meaning doesn’t it? See, I wondered about that. In a world where… let me back up.

A POD printing machine can cost a lot. The books it produces are vastly more expensive per unit than offset printing. So why would I, and I will, leap to an idea that a major publisher will move to exclusively POD printing eventually? Well. Yes the cost per unit rises, and the initial outlay is large. But right now with offset you have to print a huge print run and then store them. So storage fees go away completely. Also shipping fees from your offset printer to your warehouses, those go away. And those aren’t going to be small amounts. Plus, lets say you put your POD machine next door to your book distributor of choice. I mean why wouldn’t you? you just removed 90% of the shipping fees to get your books to the distributors office.

At the minimum the costs will balance. So why not move to POD?

Once you do we’re back to the “out of print” issue. When is a book out of print if it is POD? There is never any stock to judge it by, after all. The old metrics fall away. And the first level is a “so what” but then you figure authors have contracts. Those contracts specify when the author can take a book to another publisher. See, if Book A does ok, and then a few years later is does pretty badly due to natural life cycle things the publisher might take it out of print. The contract deals with that and the rights revert to the author. At which point publisher B steps in and decides that they want to bring out a special memorial edition of Book A, throw some money behind it and get it rolling again. Well cool. The author makes more money, selling the book again, more people read it and everyone is basically happy.

Except you need a new way to define out of print.

I figured we would go to a system of virtual benchmarks: numbers of copies sold per year, and the like. I mailed Cory Doctorow, since he is both smart, well published, and has strange contracts (he has to, seriously) and asked him if this was something that was already being taken care of or still brand new.

He was good enough to get back to me very quickly and make it clear that I am far from alone in seeing this and many contracts already deal in this sort of new benchmark making a mad science of copies sold per year and ad dollars spent and so on.

So the issue is known and being dealt with. Cool beans, yo.

But it draws my eyes in other directions as well. The New York Public Library (NYPL, because some days I like acronyming things) recently purchased, installed and demonstrated its new Espresso Book Machine at the Science, Industry and Business Library.

I take here three different paragraphs from the press release:

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and Jason Epstein’s own “Book Business.” The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance (“OCA”), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

If Gutenberg (not Steve) could see us now. This was, I feel, his dream. Think about it. You can go into this library and get a printed, bound edition of these books. All yours. Just because you want one. Fairly close to instantly. That’s amazing and cool as fucking hell. Let’s be honest here. It makes disposable books, in a lot of ways. And while that can sound bad I argue it is great. A lot of people don’t have the space to store books. But knowing you can get a public domain title to read that is yours to keep or not as you need—that could be interesting. Still, overall, cool.

The direct-to-consumer model of the EBM eliminates shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allows simultaneous global availability of millions of new and backlist titles in all categories and languages. These savings permit potentially lower prices to consumers and libraries, and greater royalties and profits to authors and publishers.

Well sure it increases profit per unit for the publishers and authors. Their numbers don’t change much. With less warehousing and shelving and return issues bookstores can cut their margin to the bone and so could publishers.

But come on, do you think that will happen at all? Book prices would suddenly drop? Seriously? Look at the CD market. It could have dropped. It was proven that the prices are criminal in their overcharging. A $17 dollar CD costs pennies to make. The $16.90 extra … well how much of that goes to warehousing, store mark-up and the rest of the channel? I don’t know but given the bulk of units moved it can’t be close to bone-cutting. Prices don’t tend to drop. If you’ll buy a book for 8 dollars now then you will buy it for 8 dollars tomorrow. Regardless of if it costs the store 6 dollars, 5 dollars or 1 dollar to stock. You will pay the same amount. So I don’t see these great savings passed on to the consumer.

I see the opposite. I see book prices going up. “Use this new machine! Get the book you want FAST and a copy printed JUST FOR YOU! Only $14.99!” Except the book costs 8 if you buy it off the shelf. Ahhh but the new fancy machine makes it sparkle and so it costs more. And once they only use the machine, well the $14.99 will be normal by then.

Cynical? Maybe. Truthful and based in history and fact? You betcha!

Additional EBM’s will be installed this fall at the New Orleans Public Library, the University of Alberta (Canada) campus bookstore, the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, and at the Open Content Alliance in San Francisco. Beta versions of the EBM are already in operation at the World Bank Infoshop in Washington, DC and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (The Library of Alexandria, Egypt). National book retailers and hotel chains are among the companies in talks with ODB about ordering EBM’s in quantity.

It’s spreading. It’s … alive!

Seriously though what will this to do back catalogs and libraries and retail stores? What will it honestly do? Because they talk of how it will increase access to the back catalog. And yet I have reasons to doubt that some.

Access to, strictly speaking, will increase.

Practical access to / information about / knowledge of the back catalog will not. As the machines grow more popular, bookshelf space will be used, chances are, less and less. Why pay for a huge retail space when you can offer 17 times as many books out of half the space? You wouldn’t.

So what do you do with that bookshelf space? you put the best sellers on it. You put the big name items, because those you will sell off-hand far more often. Those are the things people will walk in and pick up and walk back off with. They are what you want to be seen with.

Now the back catalog, that’s all there. Anyone can decide they want those books. But how do they know about them? How do they know what’s there? This is already a problem where there are so many books fighting for shelf space that books and authors are being lost in the shuffle faster and faster every day. If they don’t even have spine space to wave hello from how much attention do you think they’ll ever get? How will someone hear about a book to know to go look for it? It runs the risk of marginalizing far more books overall, while making an amazing amount available.

And at that it may be worth it.

Perhaps reviews become even more crucial. The only way you know about a new book is through a review you see. And with POD added to the mix you could read a review click a link and have the book on its way to you. Maybe that instant purchase effect will just speed up. So that could be good.

And maybe authors become more and more responsible for promoting their own work. Not that they shouldn’t be already. Maybe Cory Doctorow is right (numbers seem to prove him right so far, as far as I know) that offering your books online for free increases physical sales. Perhaps Miranda July is onto something special when she makes sure the webpage about her new book is so memorable I don’t remember her name. I remember the books name, and the website. And that’s what matters because it gets the word out and people looking. I don’t know.

Maybe the more things change the more they stay the same and none of this will matter at all in the long run. That one I doubt but I have to be open to it. I don’t know. That much I am certain of.

I don’t know where we go from here. Not in big broad steps or tiny defined ones. I know I keep writing. I know I keep an eye on all of this because it interests me and is important to me. I know those things.

But what the future holds: I do not know.
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Added bonus section!

Maybe you do know what the future holds for publishing. Maybe you have insight that is better than mine. Maybe you want to share that. Please, do. By comments here or by email to adampknave @ gmail.com I would love to hear where you think this all goes and why and how and, shit, all of it.

Sometimes I want to write a story called The Day The Weebles Fell but I’m sure licensing would be a bitch and I’d have to pay Playskool or some stupid shit like that. Which is why you’ve never gotten read such moments as:

“The light dimmed behind Tippy. He shuddered, the fear manifesting as a slight backward and forward motion, and he wobbled and chewed his lip and prayed to God that someone would come and save him. Deep down in his wide, round, stabilizing ass, Tippy knew that no one could help him now. No one at all.”

So really, it’d be your loss, not mine.

You know, a while back I thought about trying to get into writing porn. Writing funny/strange porn, mind you.

I figured, why should most porn be badly done Pizza Guy scenes when there is an almost untapped market for strange original comedies? This market exists everywhere, really and why shouldn’t porn get some of it?

I considered Seduction Cinema because they, at least, get the goofy angle to things. They not only do titles like Play-Mate of the Apes they don’t take them seriously. Rock on, kiddies, I say.

But it isn’t going far enough on the farce scale for me.

I wanted to write porn that was half slapstick. Sure, there’s fucking and wanton fucking at that, but there were also touching, heart-warming scenes of people falling down stairs.

It’s all in how you do it. Someone falls down stairs? Pratfalls are funny. Someone falls down the stairs, causing her clothing to come off? PratPorn falls are born. Everything can lead to fucking. Think about it. Sex can just happen bang you don’t know when. One minute you’re trying to get your car restarted on the highway. The next minute a cute female cop stops to lend you a hand. But while she’s looking at your engine, the thing starts, a fan belt grabs her shirt and in the ensuing madness you end up fucking.

The transition needs a bit of work, but it could happen and if you think it couldn’t… well maybe my life has been more interesting than yours.

Still, why wouldn’t some of the movies like American Pie still work if they also had some honest-to-Holmes fucking in them? We have this hang-up about it that needs to be broken down and I figure I might be the guy to do the breaking.

So, of course, I couldn’t find a good way to break into the business, much less a company that would be interested. You all miss out, now. My porn-genius will go undiscovered.

But still, for you guys, I will give you a bit of a script idea I was working on:

Pr0n: The movie

The set-up: A guy gets sucked into his computer and forced to play various adult themed video games, from the inside. He also has to stop the Master Computer from destroying him, because it wants to take over the world through superior processor power. Only Pr0n stands in the Master Computer’s way.

Ok, maybe that one wasn’t the best. But the War Games porn parody was just depressing. No, no, I kid, I keeed! What we need is original, well written, funny porn - to enlighten, amuse and titillate audiences around the globe. So - either who’s hiring or who wants to fund and star in a movie? Cause I got ideas. Big ideas. Ideas with Koosh balls and Pez dispensers. I even have an idea with a Slinky, but you aren’t ready for that one yet.