h a l f b a k e r yGood ideas at the time.
add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, best, random
news, help, about, links, report a problem
browse anonymously,
or get an account
and write.
register,
|
|
|
BookBridge
Printer supplies subsidised by subscription to a (former) book publisher's product outlet. | |
Print is dead.
Except that more people than ever have quite high
quality
printers at home. Except they can't afford to print stuff
on
them - at least, no more than a few pages a week. The
ink costs are exorbitant.
eBooks are where it's at (soon). Many publishers are
moving to eBook
formats. Admittedly at the moment,
the
ebook format landscape is bit of a mess, as there's too
great a fan-out of options and you never know which
ones
will become the Andrewsarchus (ie, the SmartMedia or
the Betamax or the Minidisc) of the ebook format
evolutionary tree.
Fears that people are not reading or consuming books
quite as much as they used to be are perhaps with
grounding, but this should not be confused with the
newspaper industry, which certainly is undergoing a
rapid
devolution. Nevertheless, most book publishers are
interested in a way of avoiding the actual print and
distribution costs, but wary of the increased risk of
piracy
if a full scale move to ebooks were initiated. Print on
demand (POD) is certainly a useful business ingredient
of
most publishers today, and arguably has saved many of
them so far.
A solution might be at hand, although not a technical
one
but rather a strategic one. Highly granular POD - the
customer buys a book as (for example) a PDF. This
contains all of the stylistic information as well as the
content, ready to read either on screen or be printed on
to paper. But wait - who would print an entire ebook
onto
paper? That'd be insane, cost-wise.
What if printers were to conform to a specific standard,
laid down by publishers? The consumer digital
photographic industry has cooked up their "PictBridge"
standard enabling people to hook up their cameras to
their printers or other devices with a minimum of fuss,
achieving predictable and controllable results. What if
there were a similar platform of specifications and
capabilities such as "BookBridge".
BookBridge would specify a printer that is robust enough
to print an entire book in one take, without mishaps.
The
BookBridge printer would be duplex by default,
enabling
both-sided collated printing from an ebook source. The
BookBridge printer would also have a cover paper tray,
which can hold a fairly stiff board without having to go
round a tight curve, to print the cover with. The
BookBridge printer would also know how to and be able
to
introduce an effective scoring or folding method to the
paper and cover sheets, enabling (for example) A4
sheets
to be folded into signature sections that result (when
bound) in an A5 book. All of this must be quite cost-
effective and therefore only built to a 'personal' scale.
The BookBridge printer would have a cost-effective
binding method. Admittedly, the scoring and binding
probably won't be as durable or robust as the perfect-
binding methods of conventional books, but it would
certainly suffice for the short lifetime of many books,
spanning some years. The mechanisms for scoring,
stitching and binding would be quite simplistic and cost-
effective.
Incidentally, this opens up the option of only printing
out clusters of chapters, rather than binding the whole
book at once, making it easier to carry the bit you're
reading with you on the train. When you come near the
end of chapter 4, that evening you start printing and
binding chapter
5 (or 5+6).
All of the consumables would be subsidised by the
membership of various publishers and their product
schemes, which allow you to purchase ebooks (not
paper
books) that are designed for POD in your own printer.
Thus, the PDF is merely an intermediary format (as it is
in
professional publishing anyway). If the consumer
purchases about, let's say, more than ten books per
year,
and prints them out (on subsidised ink), perhaps both
the
consumer and the publisher would find this an
agreeable
value transaction.
Of course, it's your printer, so you can also print what
you
like on it - photos, etc. I suppose this is a modern
rendition of a "book club" scheme.
[link]
|
| |
[+] just for originality, but I'm not sure it's viable: |
|
| |
What you want in essence is for everybody to own their own book-making machine, then the publishers deliver the ink and glue, and you buy paper locally ? |
|
| |
I've a banner-size laser that does a seriously nifty job on pamphlets and owner's manuals as well as the short-run A4 booklets I bought the thing for in the first place. But it doesn't do duplex :( or trimming or glueing or advanced binding, etc. .... that would make it 2-3 times the size and noise it is now. |
|
| |
Screw e-books until they're industry standard format and have Save options.... oh yeah, and until the e-paper doesn't require a whole-page blanking on every page turn. |
|
| |
It would right now, but if effort were put into
development of process improvements in
manufacturing
the physical handling side of such items, I'm sure it
could also be built to be slick and quiet and
acceptable
in the home. |
|
| |
Alternatively, maybe improvements in what kind of
binding is deemed as acceptable for a personal POD
printer/finisher. Perhaps there's acceptance for simply
saddle folding and punching, and the user inserts the
signature - punched - into their own leather binder.
The leather binder might be their own personal
reading binder, and when finished, the signature can
be put with all the other ones that have been read, in
the book's 'proper' cover, and tagged together neatly.
Or something. |
|
| |
Thing is, the local Kinkos equivalent doesn't even do what I'd consider to be acceptable binding to stick in a personal-library. |
|
| |
(guess I should note that my general diet consists of paperbacks, which aren't *that* expensive and if they're decent they get re-read 5-10 years down the line; seriously decent and the hardcover gets purchased, opportunity willing) |
|
| |
Then there you are - that's a whole area of technological
development opening up to whoever can fill the criteria.
Who'd have thought an 'ink jet' mechanism could ever be
developed that would be accurate and compact enough
to have more than one in every town, etc, etc. |
|
| |
Incidentally, I really don't like conventional book
bindings. I think I'd prefer them if they were in fact
loosely bound, in a binder. Then I could open them
and leave them open without dedicating a whole hand
or at least a thumb to performing that job. The
current state-of-the-art
perfect binding has benefits, but they're not really
user benefits, but rather, supplier benefits. I want a
book that stays open. I want a modular book that I
don't have to carry the whole thing around - just the
chapter or two that I'm on right now. Punched
bindings are probably the way to go. I'm not sure.
There's probably some other playground to develop
what is an acceptable, effective and elegant binding
method that is also easy to build a machine to do in
the home. |
|
| |
But in the same way that PictBridge is stupid, because printing photos at home always costs more and achieves a poorer print quality than uploading your picture files to a web-based service which sends you prints in the post (overpriced ink and paper and an uncalibrated printer vs. commercial grade printer, economies of scale and real photographic paper), so BookBridge will fail, because you'll spend more on the consumables needed to print your book than you'd have to pay Amazon to send it to you in the post. |
|
| |
Note that economies of scale inherently apply to mass market paperbacks, but there's really no such thing as a mass market photograph - so PictBridge may make sense in that light. |
|
| |