Yesterday, Xerox announced a joint sales and marketing agreement with On Demand Books wherein the Xerox 4112 Copier/Printer will be integrated with the Espresso Book Machine – a fully integrated solution that prints, binds and trims books with full color covers on demand in retail locations and libraries. The Espresso Book Machine can produce paperbacks in variable combinations of trim sizes between 4.5″ x 5.0″ and 8.25″ x 10.5″ for a production cost less than one cent per page and can produce a 300 page book in about 4 minutes.

If you watch this video released last September by Google you will notice the EBM has the Xerox 4112 print engine.

While the Espresso Book Machine has the potential to be a game changer, one Australian bookstore has taken the machine off its store floor to make room for traditional book merchandise. Print21 reports the EBM at Angus & Robertson in Melbourne, Australia failed to engage customers:

Patrick Gaskin, business development director at RedGroup Retail said that the decision to take the machine out of the store was due to logistics. “Space is at a premium in that store so the EBM was removed to make room for Christmas trade,” he said.

Staff from the Bourke Street store said that the machine had been moved to a warehouse. Currently, there is no option for anyone wanting to purchase or print any of the 100-plus books previously offered by Angus & Robertson.

Print21 cites low print and finishing quality of a sample they had printed at the Angus & Robertson:

The quality of the books printed, however, was disappointing. After paying $30 for one title, Print21 received a book with a chipped spine, off-centre titles and text that was almost too faint to read. A problem with the EBM also meant that the book had to be printed twice.

The EBM was originally configured with a lower end machine from Kyocera when it first came on the market.

Google has published a video for those unfamiliar with on-demand book production.

The Wired.com article on the partnership included a quote from Dane Neller, On Demand Books CEO about adding Web-to-print functionality to Google Books, “Neller said he’d love to see the day when Google Book Searchers can press a button next to a search result and find the closest local printer, but Google says that’s a long way off.”

I’m not surprised Google isn’t planning on providing local printing just yet, but where is the option to have a book printed and shipped? Lighting Source does this for thousands of titles on Amazon.com everyday. The IT practices are place and the print factories are built. What’s taking so long? Is Google waiting for the dust to settle around its settlement with publishers before it provides access to printed copies of books?

But there are plenty of unanswered questions. There are less than a dozen machines in existence, all custom-assembled prototypes. The economic model hasn’t been clear. There haven’t been many books available for printing. There have been questions about how maintenance would be handled.

Over the next few months, it looks like all of these questions will be addressed. On Demand Books is starting to roll out version 2.0 of the Espresso machine, the first real production model. The installed base should grow rapidly. The cost structure is becoming clear (bookstores will pay On Demand Books a penny per page click charge and will pay a “royalty” to the publisher). There has not been an official statement on field service, but a deal is apparently in the works.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, On Demand Books now has a large catalog of books that can be printed on the machine. The company has struck a deal with LightningSource and 12 publishers (mostly big ones) to get access to the files of 85,000 titles that LightningSource currently has on its POD system. All of these titles will be available for in-store printing. More detailed information on this deal is here.

So the real test of in-store printing is about to begin. If it is successful, it could disrupt a lot of things in the book industry: the competition between large and small bookstores, the balance between offset and POD book printing, the viability of “micro-publishers” in local niches, and the dependence of the publishing industry on the “returns” system. It will be an interesting process to watch as it unfolds.

Officially, the ten sites (including bookstores and libraries) where the Espresso is installed are beta test sites. But the results are promising. Assuming On Demand Machines can eventually replicate the Alberta success in dozens of other locations, I think this marks a change in the book printing world even more profound than the change initiated by LightningSource ten years ago, when it proved that producing single copies of books, on demand, could be profitable.

There is more on the Espresso Book Machine and its meaning for the industry at Beyond Print.