On Demand Books Announces the New Espresso Book Machine 2.0

According to Neller, the company expects this newly updated Espresso Book Machine to be embraced by an industry facing the same economic downturn as other industries.

"The machine cuts out traditional supply chain costs," Neller says. "Publishers will be able to better manage and help monetize their backlists. It really can do many things. It's designed to print one book at a time. There are no returns. A PDF [of a book] is sold and printed."

According to Neller, the newly released machine will print books—from 40 to 830 pages—for a penny a page.

Toby Green, head of publishing for the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), one of the world’s largest publishers in the fields of economics and public policy, says it has reaped the benefits of partnering with On Demand on an earlier model of the Espresso Book Machine.

"Being a specialist publisher with a global audience, anything that cuts time-to-market has to be a good thing," Green says. "For example, it currently takes us around six weeks to get a book to market in Australia from our base in Paris. Since many of our books get coverage in global media, like the Financial Times, you can imagine this causes a good deal of customer frustration—not to mention lost sales. Since demand for our titles is too small in each market to justify the cost of offset printing locally, the arrival of these machines is, quite frankly, a godsend."

All publishers need to do to have their titles available on the Espresso Book Machine is to provide a PDF of the titles to be printed, Neller says.

For book retailers, the technology appears to have received high marks so far, too. Todd Anderson, of the University of Alberta Bookstore, says the store has recouped its initial investment of its Espresso Book Machine in just the first year of use.