Springer Science+Business Media the publisher of science, technology and medicine books, manuals and journals has announced its eBook catalog is now available in print at participating libraries in North America that have have purchased Springer eBook Collection. According to the company, “All registered library patrons will be able to order a softcover copy of a Springer eBook for their personal use the Springer platform www.springerlink.com..” The books format is perfect bound with a color cover and monochrome interior.

“We tested and evaluated market acceptance. The test phase was a complete success, as the libraries and their patrons confirmed,” said Dr. Olaf Ernst, President of eProduct Management & Innovation at Springer. “The order processing, rapid delivery and attractive price of the books convinced library users that this is a good deal. The logical decision for Springer was to offer MyCopy as an extended service for our library customers and their users. It makes the steadily growing eBook range even more attractive to the science and research market.”

The print production for the MyCopy service will be handled by Lighting Source, a unit of Ingram Content Group. Ingram Content Group comprised of Ingram Book Group, Lightning Source and Ingram Digital was recently formed.

Baker & Taylor, Ingram’s main competitor in book distribution, has announced a book-on-demand operation of its own, scheduled to launch in September. I talked to a B&T spokesperson, who made it clear that like LightningSource (which is owned by Ingram), the B&T service is designed for true run-length-of-one POD book printing. The actual production will be handled by R.R. Donnelley using equipment that RRD is setting up inside B&T’s distribution facility in Momence, Illinois.

This announcement is probably good news for publishers (since the service is likely to give LightningSource some needed competition) but not so good for digital book printers (apart from Donnelley) who may lose a chunk of business to the new operation.

The B&T press release is here

Last week Bowker released its annual statistics on book publishing in the U.S. for 2008. Using its Books In Print database the company projects a decrease in U.S title output by 3.2% or 275,232 new titles and editions. It reported a small increase last year.

In 2008 Bowker also reported “On Demand” Publishing More than doubled: “Bowker projects that 285,394 On Demand books were produced last year, a staggering 132% increase over last year’s final total of 123,276 titles. This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in the On Demand segment, which in 2008 was 462% above levels seen as recently as 2006.”

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing with the notion that a good way to think about the global print industry is using the word “printernet” to capture what might be going on.

Yesterday, I got a chance to test it out in a more public venue in a column at PBS.org/mediashift. The title, chosen by the editor, is ‘Printernet’ Vision Brings Custom Print Publications to Masses”

The general tenor over there is that Print is Dead, newspapers have to go online, and other internet bedazzled visions of the future of journalism. I’m posting here in the hope of getting some feedback from my esteemed colleagues in Print, where I don’t have to take a defensive stance proving that the sky is not falling and print is not dead.

From a PR point of view the notion is “Now that the internet is in place, the printernet is ready to emerge.’ That’s for the kids in school to get them to be excited about Print.

From the professional point of view,”. . . this so-called “printernet” can have the same benefits as the Internet — massive parallel manufacturing with standards-based interfaces, real time production information and easy access for everyone. Each printer — the combination of the machinery and the intelligence that manages the machinery — is a print output node.”

My hypothesis is that one of the things that has kept us from seeing the emerging role for Print, is that we’ve been using old thought models that don’t capture a new environment. The facts on the ground are that the Eurocentric era of the global economy is coming to close and that new value in the form of previously impossible customer experiences are enabled by the network, not by stand alone printing companies.

While I was researching the column I came across pediapress.com in Germany. They’ve released Open Source software to automatically go from wikipedia pages to PDF,ODF, and XML. They are monetizing their invention by selling Wikipedia Printed books through their website. Just recently they’ve expanded from German to the other major European languages.

I think wikis have become the platform of choice for organizing content on the web. PBwiki.com, a start-up, says they are doing enterprise content management for over 200,000 businesses and 100′s of thousands of schools. Meanwhile, Newspapers and physical communities are organizing their content in wikis.

Given that my focus is high school education in the States, I think I’m seeing textbooks being replaced by WikiBooks and WikiNewspapers. The new experience will be cheaper, faster and much more effective in getting students to learn to love to learn.

I keep turning it over and over, and I can’t see why it wouldn’t work.

Any thoughts?

For at least two decades, people have been talking about putting book printing right in the bookstore. The approach has the potential to solve a lot of problems: the bookstore (and its customers) can select from a very deep inventory, without having to have all those books (and multiple copies of many of them) on hand. Returns are essentially eliminated. There’s no warehousing, and no shipping costs. The main problems have been: creating reliable hardware and systems that are easy to use but produce high-quality books, convincing publishers to go along with the scheme, and making it sufficiently economical to buy and run the equipment.
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Hot on the heels of its $125 million dollar settlement with book publishers over the company’s plan to scan out-of-print books and add them to its online search capability, Google now wants to be the place people go to read. The book-scanning project is being expanded to include in-print books with the links to buy them. Google expects it to go live sometime in 2009. The catch is that the books can only be read on a computer. This puts them into competition with Amazon which also envisions people curling up with their laptop to read the latest from a favored author.

I suppose there are those who will think this is marvelous, and who will enjoy the instant gratification of buying a book online and being able to enjoy it immediately, but I think it really changes the experience of reading and overcomplicates what is really a simple process. Books are totally portable, can be read anywhere there is a reasonable light source, and don’t depend on batteries (unless you read by flashlight). Books can be passed along to friends and family, and when placed in a bookcase are a monument to the curiosity and interests of the reader. Then there is the tactility of a book, the turning of the pages, and yes, the lack of technology required to simply read. Many of us already spend more time than we’d like staring at a computer screen and I question how many will want to do their personal reading –which is often a time of escape from the day-to-day– just a click away from the distractions of emails and the internet.

Some years back Frank Romano famously pointed out that printed books will survive because of the Three Bs: Bedroom, Bathroom and Beach. He wasn’t wrong then and his insight holds true today.

Book Business Magazine has an article in this month’s issue on digital book printing and print on-demand (available online here).

The article points out the success PublicAffairs, an imprint of The Perseus Books Group had with moving one its fast selling books to a print on-demand model at Lighting Source:

Demand went vertical, and there was a period of time when orders were coming in and they [didn’t have] any copies … [available] anywhere,” says Lightning Source President David Taylor. “So John Ingram said to Peter Osnos, ‘Look, give us the file, and we’ll set it up as an on-demand model, and we’ll fulfill at least some of those orders.’ ”

The problem for Perseus became an opportunity for Ingram to show the world the value of on-demand digital printing.

“We got the file from them on the Monday morning after BookExpo America, and we were printing the first books that afternoon,” Taylor recounts. “We actually moved over our entire casebook production to just that book for a period of 48 hours. We printed several thousand copies, and those were orders that otherwise would have just [been lost] or would have not been fulfilled. When the offset order came back in, we switched it off.”

An interesting comment from Edwards Brothers CEO John Edwards on not using digital to describe the printing process:

“I’m trying to not call it digital anymore,” he says. “It’s short-run. I don’t want to have to differentiate anymore [between digital and offset]. We’re focusing on making it seamless for the publishing community as far as how [a book is] made.”

This makes a lot of sense. There are still a lot of print buyers in the industry that perceive digital as inferior. Something that is easily debunked by showing printed product samples.

Read the whole article at Book Business.

Bibliographic information provider R.R. Bowker last week released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2007. Their findings suggest U.S. title output in 2007 increased slightly to 276,649 new titles and editions, up from the 274,416 that were published in 2006.

According to R.R. Bowker traditional book publishing was basically flat last year. While a “staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books.”

“The most startling development last year is the reporting of ‘On Demand’ titles, leading to a stunning five-fold increase of new titles in the unclassified category, which mostly consists of reprints of public domain titles and other short-run books,” said Kelly Gallagher, general manager of business intelligence. “It will be interesting to monitor this category in 2008 in order to get a sense of whether this is a sustainable trend or a one-year spike.”