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.-- Ian Tindale, Aug 17 2009 [+] 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.-- FlyingToaster, Aug 17 2009 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.-- Ian Tindale, Aug 17 2009 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)-- FlyingToaster, Aug 17 2009 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.-- Ian Tindale, Aug 17 2009 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.-- Ian Tindale, Aug 17 2009 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.-- hippo, Aug 19 2009 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.-- jutta, Aug 19 2009 halfbakery