This year, I was introduced to the Espresso Book Machine at a Northwest bookstore and learned there were three of these machines in Western, WA, all of them not too far from where I live. Not too long after that, I met an author publishing his books locally by using one of them and giving successful bookstore readings from his novel. Then, I met Tera Kelley, who runs the Espresso Book Machine at the University of Washington Bookstore in Seattle. As Tera and I were preparing this article, a writer friend of mine who is well published with traditional presses showed off the new book she published via the Espresso Book Machine for a targeted niche audience of her students. She and Tera confirmed what seems like a miracle, “The Espresso Book Machine prints, binds, and trims a paperback book in a matter of minutes.” 

The Espresso Book Machine website lists 22 locations in the US that have the machine as well as locations in Canada and abroad in Europe, Africa and Asia. It’s about the size of a large office business machine.

Sheila
When I hear “The Espresso Book Machine prints, binds, and trims a paperback book in a matter of minutes,” I immediately wonder if I can send a printed manuscript or email you one, come in to the bookstore and watch my electronic version becoming a print book with a beautiful cover while I wait?

Tera
As long as the files are set up according to our specs , we can print just about anything. We do need digital files — one for the interior and one for the cover — in order to print. If you’re tech savvy, you can set up the files on your own, or you can have us do the formatting for you. And, yes, you can come watch your books printing before your eyes. Our Book Machine is right out on the main floor of our University District store, around the corner from the cash registers.

Sheila
How did you find your job with the Espresso Book Machine?

Tera
I’ve come and gone from the University Book Store many times over the last five years. I’ve always wanted my work to revolve around books. I tried out internships at a couple of small publishers, Copper Canyon Press in Port Townsend and Wave Books in Seattle. Publishing felt like a good fit for me, though finding a job in a shrinking market seemed unlikely. I was amazed at my good fortune when the Book Store offered me this position as Print-On-Demand Coordinator, literally making books on the Espresso Book Machine. The Book Machine showed up in late January of this year. Since then we have created a self-publishing department where we print everything from novels, self-help, biography and poetry, to dissertations, class projects, and academic articles. My job stretches from book layout and design to machine maintenance, from researching out-of-print books to talking to people about the new technology and what it offers.

Sheila
What do think writers need to know about the Espresso Machine?

Tera
Writers should know how easy it is to get your book in a professional, good-looking format. More and more books are being published outside of the traditional large publishing houses, and with local and Internet marketing, authors can reach out to their potential audience directly. If you believe in your writing, get it out there now. Why not? With print-on-demand you can print anywhere from one copy to hundreds, so there’s a minimal investment to start selling your own books.

Sheila
I think that compared to other services for self-publishing writers, the Book Espresso Machine offers some cost advantages. Although the author purchase price per copy is a little higher than other print-on-demand venues (my friend’s 145 page book cost her about $6 a copy from the machine—other print-on-demand copies are available to authors for a few dollars less, but with the Book Espresso Machine, the set up fee is quite small compared to the other print-on-demand venues. In addition, you don’t have to order hundreds or thousands of books printed at a time to receive a quantity discount. I know your pricing is online.

 

What are other advantages to using the Espresso Book Machine over working with the online print-on-demand services offered by Trafford, Lulu, and other companies?

Tera
We offer a more hands-on approach to making books. You can learn about your publishing options from an actual person, rather than a web page. At each step of your project you can make the call whether to take control or delegate work to our design and formatting experts. We’d like to think the Espresso Book Machine is the most accessible self-publishing option out there, and not just because you get to see your books made right in front of you. In the next month we will have a Community Authors display next to the Book Machine to feature our self-publishing clients. We are also starting to do author readings in-store.

Sheila
Does the machine have value to readers as well as authors?

Tera
We have a new print-on-demand inventory of three million titles. Most of the titles are public domain books scanned by Google, but there are a growing number of regular publishers who want their books to be available through the Espresso Book Machine. For example, Norton and Random House and a number of academic presses have added their backlist books. Curious readers can search what’s available by following the Espresso Book Machine links on our website.

Sheila
In your experience, who best uses this self-publishing venue and for what sort of projects?

Tera
There are plenty of possibilities. We print dissertations, school projects, novels, poetry, family memoirs. One technical limitation to printing with the Book Machine is that we aren’t taking on thousand copy print runs. We specialize in smaller orders, from just a few copies to a few hundred. The beauty of print-on-demand is that you can always come back and print another batch when you need them.

Sheila
Can you offer us a case history of a successful client who had her or his needs well met using the Espresso Book Machine services?

Tera
Our most successful self-publishing project thus far is a fantasy novel written by a local, eleven-year old girl. With the help of family and friends, she has had her book published through our University Book Store Press with great cover and interior design. She has sold hundreds of copies. It’s a great story, the book is designed well, and her family has really gotten the word out.

Sheila
Helping kids get started in the publishing world is a great service! Are you talking with teachers and schools about using the process to publish?

Tera
We already do school fairs and educator conferences, so we’ve been talking to schools we already have connections with about the opportunities the Espresso Book Machine provides. I could see us reaching out further — just as soon as we have the time!

Sheila
What is a typical or doable print run? What does a book cost? Are ensuing orders less expensive because they don’t involve set up?

Tera
Many authors start out with a print run of 30 to 50 copies. I would say that most of them end up coming back for another batch a few weeks later. Once the book is set up, you only pay for the cost of the book, which is priced per page count. You can email me at ubs_publish@earthlink.net to get our price guide. We should also have it up on our website soon.

Sheila
If people who are not local to the Seattle area would like your help, can you work by phone and email? What is the cost to them of shipping their copies to them?

Tera
We have already worked with a few out-of-staters. As long as you can email us the files, we’re able to upload them and ship them out. I already do a lot of communicating via email or phone, even with in-staters. Shipping depends on the weight of the book and whether you go with media mail or UPS (for the more eager author).

Sheila
What are the most important things users need to know to make the venture work well for them and their publication?

Tera
Authors really get to call the shots in this process. You can have us design the book and then make the final decision on what looks best, or you can do all the design work yourself. I tell authors to look at the books on their shelves and think about what would be right for their book. The better you can communicate what you want to us, the better the book will turn out.

Sheila
Might you share an anecdote or two about this part of the process that show us what works between you and the author and what doesn’t when you are designing a book with someone? How does the process work between you and the writer? Can you give us an example?

Tera
Recently I helped a woman create a biography of her grandfather to share with her family. She ended up getting 20 copies of a high quality book that we were both very satisfied with. I did the cover design and helped her polish up the interior. She took every proof and went through it with a fine-tooth comb. What worked well in this relationship was that bouncing drafts back and forth, we benefited from each other’s judgment and expertise. She was a great editor of her own work and seeing the book in different forms was able to get fresh perspective on it. I started with a basic idea of what she wanted and course-corrected as she gave me feedback.

One chronic problem with self-publishing is that the author doesn’t get feedback about design and content, which would allow them to look at their book with fresh eyes. While we don’t provide editorial services in-house, we do provide full design services. Even just looking at a printed proof can give an author a new perspective on a book’s possibilities and who its audience is. For editorial services we refer people to Northwest Independent Editor’s Guild, which takes the local talent and puts it to work for you. You may not be going the traditional publishing route, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the same attention to your manuscript from quality editors.

Sheila
Are there problems with the technology? How do you overcome them?

Tera
One of our biggest issues is with photographs. Digital photography comes out great–though we are only able to print black and white interiors. (They haven’t come out with a color interior option for the EBM yet.) Older scanned photos sometimes come out great, and…sometimes they don’t. Finding the highest quality image helps, as well as making adjustments in Photoshop.

Sheila
Do you help authors figure out how to get the highest quality images they can?

Tera
We usually have some back and forth about photo quality, especially after the first proof comes out. Sometimes the author is able to make adjustments on their own, but often I play around with the original file and run tests on our printer to get the best quality possible.

Sheila
What can you tell us about what you think the future of publishing is after your experience with the machine? From your experience, what niche do you think the Espresso Book Machine fills in today’s publishing market?

Tera
The Espresso Book Machine is a hybrid of digital and print technology. You have the immediacy and accessibility we’re used to in the age of iPhones, but we’re able to translate the virtual into something you can hold in your hand. I think we’ll continue to shift towards digital media instead of print books, but there’s plenty of room for the book as object.

At the bookstore, we want to be able to get books in people’s hands when they want them, but we have an ongoing problem of trying to keep a large number of books on our shelves, which requires a high overhead, while facing the competition from Amazon — a company which chronically underprices books, making the market untenable for everyone else. Underselling books also destabilizes publishers in what is already a low-profit industry. Besides libraries, the most frequent purchasers of EBMs are independent bookstores. It’s possible combining print-on-demand with a regular inventory is a survival strategy.

I think it would be a shame if people were no longer able to experience browsing in the physical space and ambience of brick-and-mortar bookstores. We’re hoping that having a digital inventory to back up our traditional one will help us preserve the unique environment of the independent bookstore, a place where you can actually see the proliferating ideas and controversies of our time given the space they deserve.

It’s harder to say how print-on-demand technology will affect publishers. Ultimately, for small publishers it could mean they have their Espresso Book Machine in the basement and they don’t invest in expensive up-front print runs. It could be a way for indie publishers to publish, produce, and sell their books all under one roof. The largest benefit is that it will allow publishers to eliminate expensive storage and shipping costs, while reaching their readers with a new degree of precision. Hopefully these savings will give publishers a little more breathing room in a truly troubled industry.

Of course, so much of this depends on readers and what they want. Digital or print? Ordered through the mail or printed down the street? The weight of a book or the breeziness of a blog post. I guess we will find out.

Sheila
There certainly are options now in publishing. Many editors and gatekeepers in the publishing arena and readers, too, are wondering how we’ll know what is important information and what in literature is well crafted if anyone can put their book out there.

I’ve been to the Espresso Book Machine website and read the transcript of Chairman Joseph Epstein’s 2009 speech at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Publishing Conference. He has quite a background in publishing and sounds passionate about the role of this book machine hybrid of electronic and print media. He is democratic in his belief that what is important will rise to the surface amidst the sea of publications because humanity, he says, has a great capacity to filter:
Human nature is a marvelous filter, a superb judge of quality if not always at first, then infallibly in the long run. What is unreadable will not be read and what is false does not survive. We read Homer and Virgil but not the myriad others who have told the story of Troy. The converse is also true. Great works that had been scorned at first — the poems of John Keats, Moby Dick- are eventually cherished while Pearl Buck the best-selling Nobel laureate of my childhood and an unwitting racist — is probably unknown to most of today’s readers. God sees the truth but waits Tolstoy wrote. Churchill, more speculatively, said the same about Americans who will always do the right thing after they have exhausted all the alternatives. The mills of the gods grind slowly but they grind fine, and not just for books not worth saving but for ideologies and empires too, including Tolstoy’s and Churchill’s, to say nothing of technologies. Where are the supersonic transports of yesteryear? Where are last year’s hedge funds and their fail safe programming?

This critical faculty will not fail us as we navigate the vast, unmapped sea of undifferentiated content, untested opinion and remixed genres on the endlessly expanding world- wide web. Without our critical compass, our collective filter, to sift meaning and truth from the surrounding noise there would be no civilization, no scientific method, no digital technology and of course no book publishing industry, no libraries and no schools and we would not be here this afternoon: for there would be no New York City.

Then he says:
With the invention of the alphabet, stories could now be encoded as prose on stone, on scrolls and eventually on bound sheets called, appropriately, codexes. These codexes now embody our recorded civilization; the repository of our collective wisdom, our memory our brain. Should this collective backlist vanish so would our knowledge of who we are, where we came from or where we may be going. Within a few generations as memory deteriorates our civilizations would be lost. Whatever blessings our new technologies may bring one must pray that this heritage will not be hostage to an electronic malfunction, that the physical form in which our written civilization has resided for thousands of years will be spared the random hazards of an electronic future.

Having said this, let me say what is now perhaps too well known to bear repeating: that many texts including many of real value are intrinsically ephemeral and need no longer be printed, bound and shelved except in some cases as archival records. This is true not only of much contemporary fiction and non fiction, books which are read once, if at all, and never opened again but also encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, atlases and so on that are obsolete on the day of publication. Such ephemeral content will increasingly be accessed by multi-purpose devices, bundled and sold by category to subscribers and stored, emended or discarded as needed. I say ephemeral not disparagingly but to emphasize the extreme volatility of today’s reference and technical content.
Have you met Mr. Epstein? What is the conversation among people who help others publish their material outside of mainstream publishing houses? What are your personal thoughts?

Tera
Epstein is very eloquent. I’ve never seen him in person, but he has a great book available to print at all Espresso Book Machines, called Book Business. It is amazing to see how the book industry has changed since the innovation of paperbacks and book-of-the-month clubs back in the 1930s and 40s, which made books affordable to (almost) all. We reached the height of “traditional” book publishing in the 1950s and 60s, when publishing companies were owned by book people and had a commitment to the profession. In the years following, when the entertainment industry took an interest in books and bought out these companies, the practice of the bestseller became the modus operandi for conglomerate companies looking only at the bottom line. Over the last thirty years this has changed the nature of the book industry. Books go out-of-print as fast as they come into print. Publishers are forced to constantly look for the next bestseller to preserve an unrealistic profit margin. The same investors who bought in are now doing everything they can to get out. The book industry will always have a low profit margin, and it will only decreases with the pressure from digital media. The old model of publishing is broken. The question is how to preserve the quality of the editorial process that they once provided.

I don’t think we can escape the need for self-publishing options in contemporary culture. First of all, we have an immense amount of information to process. Books provide a site for in-depth analysis, a time-out while we separate out one muddle of information and attempt to clarify it. I think it’s really important that books, whether electronic or not, continue to hold their own as a form of culture. TV, blogging, magazine articles, and newspapers all have a place, but don’t provide the same field of reflection. Small and independent publishers represent one (unfortunately, cash-strapped) model of publishing, and self-publishing another. Of course, I’d like to see self-publishers going through the same process of editorial review that regularly published titles do, as well as receiving the financial support. But it just isn’t realistic at this point. The new marketing model is direct contact with readers online, and even a large publishing house can’t make a book sell without a lot of buzz. I think self-publishing no longer has the stigma it used to because it is genuinely necessary for authors to attempt to reach their audiences directly, and that, in brief, is what self-publishers are already doing. Luckily, they can do it without breaking the bank, using the Internet and print-on-demand services for smaller print runs. Authors also have the option of working with freelance editors and designers when creating their book, and I hope that more and more it becomes the norm for self-published authors to take their books to the next level. It’s daunting as a writer to take on so much responsibility for making your work succeed, but there’s also a creative freedom in it, and that’s the blessing and curse of our time.

Sheila
Tera, thank you so much for your time with this interview. I know Writing It Real subscribers will be excited to learn about this new option for producing their work and the inherited writings of those close to them, such as journals and collections of letters. It is exciting to think about how much easier it can be to reach audiences using the Book Espresso Machine and the help of coordinators like yourself. I know readers will be browsing your website. I just want to repeat your email address here if people want to contact you directly to work with you on their projects: ubs_publish@earthlink.net

Tera
Sheila, thanks for taking the time to learn about the Espresso Book Machine. As you noted, we have our prices and submission guidelines up on our website now, so people can look at those directly. And, of course, feel free to be in touch if you want the process broken down for you. There’s a lot to think about for first-time self-publishers.

Sheila
How much time would you need if an author wanted to get a book made for holiday gifts this year or should people be thinking about this idea for 2011?

Tera
I would say two to three weeks. But if you can get the book files print-ready for us, we can usually get your book printed in less than a week. If you’re thinking of doing it this year, start putting together the book now and shoot me an email about it. We can set up a timeframe.

Sheila
Again, thank you for all the useful information you’ve provided. I’ll be going to my files to see what work I’d like to see get out there quickly in print form.