If the world were a less stupid place, there really would be no need for bookstores. You’d simply go online, find a book you want and have it printed out remotely at a location that’s convenient to you. This way, publishers would save money by not having to print a million copies to sell 100,000, authors would be able to negotiate higher royalties and not have to deal with the problem of accounting for reserves and returns, and the entire accounting process would be simple and automatic. And don’t even get me started on the savings for the environment: no more shipping, no more waste of paper (since you only print what you need) and a greater distribution of refuse.
Of course, there would be two huge losers: bookstore chains and distributors, which luckily are already doing an excellent job of destroying the market anyway.
Small bookstores would, on the other hand, thrive, because they would be able to offer a valuable service (printing any book at any time) that is perfect for their small scale.
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Hi Marco,
I used to be in the business of selling choral music to churches and actually had meetings with Kinko’s/FedEx on this very topic. The idea was simple. A user browsed my website, found the sheet music they wanted and processed the order. My website would then forward the order electronically, delivering the requested product as a PDF to the Kinko’s nearest to the customer.
Alas, the talks broke down because in 2002, most companies were not yet comfortable with the concept of Public APIs.
At my first job here in Nashville, I worked for a company that printed manuals for computer software companies on-demand. I broached another, similar idea with them. Give web site owners an “easy to implement” way to allow users to print large PDF files. The idea was that if a user saw a large PDF file on a web site and wanted a dead tree edition, they could click a button. This would take them to our site, we would collect payment and shipping information. We would then create a job in our system that automatically printed and bound the book. (Not terribly difficult in ’97) The final output would include a shipping label so that our shipping department could simply box and ship. As part of the process, the website owner would set the price for the product and we would forward the price, minus our service fee to them. “Amazon without the warehouse”. Alas, the owner of the business could not see the vision for it.
I really wish one of those ideas would have taken off because then, I’d be writing to you this comment from the Bahama’s.
=C=
POD solves the inventory problem, but the store and staff offer services like recommendations and browsing. I think I’d spend more money in the bookstore (chain or local) if I knew I could get everything I wanted while I was there. I still go to browse, but frequently end up buying titles online because they don’t have space to keep one of everything on the shelf.
Search for Blackwell and “print on demand” — you will find a pilot effort in Blackwell bookstores in the UK doing print on demand for 400K titles.
In re: Doug Hellmann …
It seems that everyone assumes that the age of ‘browsing a bookstore’ will go away when POD takes over. But of course it need not.
Solutions such as this one, which involve an actual physical machine that prints/binds the book for you, means that there needs to be a location that houses this machine.
That location, would still be a bookstore (so to speak).
The difference could be, that the store could choose to still be a ‘nice location’ to go to. Have a coffee shop, have some nice chairs to sit in and read a little.
And yes, have bookshelves full of books that they’ve printed themselves, using the same machine, for people to browse.
One could imagine a day when you walk into one of these ‘new’ bookstores, shelves still full of books (though perhaps smaller in size, because they can easily rotate books, and have ZERO need to have more than 1 copy of any book on a shelf) …
Browse to your desire … then either walk out with a pre-printed copy, have them print you a new one, have them print you a different book, or hand over your Kindle/other-ebook-reader and have the file transferred
I actually look forward to that day, when it truly becomes as cost effective (essentially) for a local store to sell you a book, than Amazon. Which right now because of warehousing, and amount of shelf space needed, it isn’t.
Because I’ve honestly not been in a book store, except for coffee, for quite a while. When I *am* in a book store, I tend to be a ‘bad’ shopper, finding a book I like, and then ordering it on my iPhone from Amazon and saving 40% with free two-day shipping
I miss browsing the book stores.