Rick Anderson, someone always worth listening to in my book, has a new post over on the Society for Scholarly Publishing blog about his experience with the Espresso Book Machine that prints books “on demand”. Although he admittedly comes clean in the spirit of “how we did it bad” by being brutally honest about their experiences at the University of Utah, the end result clearly isn’t bad, but nuanced.
Out of the 41 installations noted by the seller of the machine, Anderson notes that only 12 are libraries. But since it’s likely that quite a few other libraries are considering such a purchase, his lessons can be very useful. They include:
- Nothing is ever as good as it sounds.
- Great concepts don’t print books; functional machines print books.
- No matter how sexy the delivery mechanism, the content matters more.
- No matter how sexy the content, a bad search interface will make it inaccessible.
- No matter how sexy the search interface, bad metadata means bad search results.
- You can’t predict what people will get excited about.
- Being an early adopter is expensive.
- Start-up companies don’t always fully know what they’re getting into.
I urge anyone interested in such a machine to read what he has to say about all of those points. The bottom line?
Having an EBM has been fun, exciting, and frustrating, and I fully expect that it will continue being all of those things for the foreseeable future — with the mix gradually shifting away from “frustrating” and towards “fun” as the technology matures and as we keep discovering new ways to put the EBM to good use for our patrons.
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