Technology Rewrites the Book
New York Times, July 20, 2006
By Peter Wayner
When Steve Mandel, a management trainer from Santa Cruz, Calif.,
wants to show his friends why he stays up late to peer through a
telescope, he pulls out a copy of his latest book, “Light in the Sky,”
filled with pictures he has taken of distant nebulae, star clusters and
galaxies.
“I consistently get a very big ‘Wow!’ The
printing of my photos was spectacular —
I did not really expect them to come out so well.” he said.
“This is as good as any book in a bookstore.”
Mr. Mandel, 56, put his book together himself with free
software from Blurb.com. The 119-page edition is printed
on coated paper, bound with a linen fabric hard cover,
and then wrapped with a dust jacket. Anyone who wants
one can buy it for $37.95, and Blurb will make a copy just
for that buyer.
The print-on-demand business is gradually moving
toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a
way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop
wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a
bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities
or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.
As the technology becomes simpler, the market is expanding beyond the earliest
adopters, the aspiring authors. The first companies like AuthorHouse, Xlibris, iUniverse
and others pushed themselves as new models of publishing, with an eye on shaking up
the dusty book business. They aimed at authors looking for someone to edit a
manuscript, lay out the book and bring it to market.
The newer ventures also produce bound books, but they do not offer the same handholding
or the same drive for the best-seller list. Blurb’s product will appeal to people
searching for a publisher, but its business is aimed at anyone who needs a professional-looking
book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to
immortalize a trip.
Blurb.com’s design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of
templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once
one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the
photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details
of the template — say, the position of a page number or a background color — the
changes affect all the pages.
The software is markedly easier to use — although less capable — than InDesign from
Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is
also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book. Prices start at
$29.95 for books of 1 to 40 pages and rise to $79.95 for books of 301 to 440 pages.
Blurb, based in San Francisco, has many plans for expanding its software. Eileen Gittins,
the chief executive, said the company would push new tools for “bookifying” data,
beginning with a tool that “slurps” the entries from a blog and places them into the
appropriate templates.
The potential market for these books is attracting a number of start-ups and established
companies, most of them focusing on producing bound photo albums. Online photo
processing sites like Kodak Gallery (formerly Ofoto), Snapfish and Shutterfly and
popular packages like the iPhoto software from Apple let their customers order bound
volumes of their prints.
These companies offer a wide variety of binding fabrics, papers, templates and
background images, although the styles are dominated by pink and blue pastels. Snapfish
offers wire-bound “flipbooks” that begin at $4.99. Kodak Gallery offers a “Legacy Photo
Book” made with heavier paper and bound in either linen or leather. It starts at $69.99.
Apple makes a tiny 2.6-by-3.5-inch softbound book that costs $3.99 for 20 pages and 29
cents for each additional page.
The nature and style of these options are changing as customers develop new
applications. “Most of the people who use our products are moms with kids,” says Kevin
McCurdy, a co-founder of Picaboo.com in Palo Alto, Calif. But he said there had been
hundreds of applications the company never anticipated: teachers who make a yearbook
for their class, people who want to commemorate a party and businesses that just want a
high-end brochure or catalog.
Picaboo, like Blurb, distributes a free copy of its book design software, which runs on the
user’s computer. Mr. McCurdy said that running the software on the user’s machine
saves users the time and trouble of uploading pictures. The companies that offer Webbased
design packages, however, point out that their systems do not require installing
any software and also offer a backup for the user’s photos.
As more companies enter the market, they are searching for niches. One small shop in
Duvall, Wash., called SharedInk.com, emphasizes its traditional production techniques
and the quality of its product. Chris Hickman, the founder, said that each of his books
was printed and stitched together by “two bookbinders who’ve been in the industry for
30 or 40 years.” The result, he said, is a higher level of quality that appeals to
professional photographers and others willing to pay a bit more. Books of 20 pages start
at $39.95.
Some companies continue to produce black-and-white books. Lulu.com is a combination
printer and order-fulfillment house that prints both color and black-and-white books,
takes orders for them and places them with bookstores like Amazon.com.
Lulu works from a PDF file, an approach that forces users to rely on basic word
processors or professional design packages. If this is too complex, Lulu offers a
marketplace where book designers offer their services. Lulu does offer a special cover
design package that will create a book’s cover from an image and handle the specialized
calculations that compute the size of the spine from the number of pages and the weight
of the paper.
A 6-by-9-inch softcover book with 150 black-and-white pages from Lulu would cost
$7.53 per single copy.
These packages are adding features that stretch the concept of a book, in some cases
undermining the permanent, fixed nature that has been part of a book’s appeal. The
software from SharedInk.com, for instance, lets a user leave out pages from some
versions of the book. If Chris does not like Pat, for instance, then the copy going to Chris
could be missing the pages with Pat’s pictures.
Blurb is expanding its software to let a community build a book. Soon, it plans to
introduce a tool that would allow group projects, like a Junior League recipe book, to be
created through Blurb’s Web site. The project leader would send out an e-mail message
inviting people to visit the site and add their contributions to customized templates,
which would then be converted into book pages.
“Books are breaking wide open,” Ms. Gittins said. “Books are becoming vehicles that
aren’t static things.”
From The New York Times on the Web © The New York Times Company. Reprinted with Permission.
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