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Espresso Book Machine Print-on-Demand

Espresso Book Machine version 1.5

Espresso Book Machine version 1.5

The recent announcement by the University of Michigan Libraries about the first-in-a-library installation of an Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books has caused quite a stir in the blogosphere. And rightly so. Given Michigan’s leadership in the area of digitizing books in the public domain, it is little wonder that they would take the next step towards a print-on-demand solution for students that want to own a hard copy of their own.

The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) might also of interest here in Ohio. OhioLINK is building a repository of recent current-year books that we license from publishers. One wonders, with the addition of an add-on license fee to the copyright owners, whether we could use such a machine to print on-demand books from current titles. On Demand Books is obviously thinking along the same lines; in April they entered into a partnership with Lightning Source Industries, which enables the EBM to print from Lightning Source’s catalogue of over 500,000 in-copyright books. The EBM can also access nearly 400,000 public domain books through their relationship with the Open Content Alliance.

This is a preview of Espresso Book Machine Print-on-Demand. Read the full post (689 words, 2 images, 2:45 minutes estimated reading time)
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2008 09 22 Comments (41)

Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization

Brewster Kahle, Director of the Internet Archive, was interviewed this week in a Chronicle of Higher Education podcast on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Among the many interesting points in the interview was that one of the biggest challenges is to such a mass digitization effort to believe that to digitize massive numbers of books and make them available is actually possible. The Open Content Alliance has put together a suite of technology that brings down the cost for a color scan with OCR to 10 cents per page or about $30 per book. He then goes on to perform this calculation: the library system in the U.S. is a 12B industry. One million books digitized a year is $30M, or “a little less than .3 percent of one year’s budget of the United States library system would build a 1 million book library that would be available to anyone for free.” He also covers copyright concerns including the more liberal copyright laws in countries such as China.

This is a preview of Brewster Kahle on the Economics and Feasibility of Mass Book Digitization. Read the full post (192 words, 46 seconds estimated reading time)
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2007 03 30 Comments (2)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 9th of September 2010 at 6:20:22 AM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/oca/

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