New York, NY–On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine, has signed with Agate Publishing to make their titles available via the EBM’s unique at point-of-sale channel.
"Agate is looking forward to working with On Demand Books to make our titles available through the Espresso Book Machine. Increasing book sales while working with innovators like ODB is essential to our future success," said Doug Seibold, president of Agate. "Espresso should make it possible for more of our books to be available at more local bookstores. This should be good for Agate's authors and our readers alike."
“Agate has a great mix of fiction and non-fiction titles that we’re excited to add to our list and to make more widely available through our growing network of machines. We’re thrilled that they have signed with us and we look forward to helping stores have access to their entire list via the EBM,” says Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books.
The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and walk out the store with right there and then.
Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over seven million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogues books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for e-readers.
The EBM provides a new sales channel for publishers, and vastly increases the availability of titles for physical bookstores, significantly reducing loss of sales due to books being out-of-stock. In addition, the EBM technology offers libraries and bricks-and-mortar retailers the opportunity to become community self-publishing centers, providing a new distribution platform for self-published authors. And of course the EBM improves overall efficiency and environmental sustainability by eliminating shipping and the return and pulping of unwanted books.
About On Demand Books
On Demand Books was cofounded in 2003 by Jason Epstein, former Editorial Director of Random House; Dane Neller, former CEO of Dean & DeLuca; and Thor Sigvaldason, former technology consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Espresso Book Machines have been placed in bookstores, libraries, universities, and other locations in the USA, Canada, the UK, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. In September 2010, On Demand Books and Xerox announced a partnership whereby Xerox will market, sell or lease and service the Espresso Book Machine worldwide. Made in the USA, Espresso Book Machines are environmentally efficient, reducing production, shipping, and waste. For more information, go to www.ondemandbooks.com.
About Agate
Founded in Chicago in 2003, Agate has five unique imprints: B2 Books, devoted to business-related nonfiction; Bolden Books, which publishes fiction and nonfiction by African-American writers; Surrey Books, founded in 1983 and acquired by Agate in 2006, which is focused on food, nutrition, and entertaining; and new in 2012, Agate Digital, devoted to stand-alone ebooks, and Midway Books, devoted to Midwestern topics and authors with a particular focus on Chicago. Among the authors published by Agate are recent winners of the James Beard, Pulitzer, and National Book Award prizes.