Publishing industry consultant Joe Esposito crackles with good ideas and his “Metadatarium” is one of them.  Stop and go back to the word and piece it out syllable by syllable until you’re comfy with it. The root word, of course, is metadata, and if you’re not sure what that means you can look it up here.  Got it?

Okay, on with the concept.

It’s a simple one, somewhere between a mega-bookstore and an e-book kiosk.”We need a utopian solution” to the crisis of our disappearing bookstores,” Esposito says. “We need our bookstores, but we also need Amazon’s inventory. We need libraries–and we need a way to pay for them. We need analog tools for discovery and digital modes of delivery. We need a Third Place for community and a Cloud-based infrastructure to deliver all information to anyone anywhere anytime. And I need a place to kill some time on Saturday afternoons.”

Put them all together and you have a metadatarium: a physical location where books are showcased, but then you point and click your mobile device at the book you’re interested in, review the information, then order it for download. We’ve long dreamed of e-book kiosks (see The Day of the Kiosks is Upon Us) and this is one way the idea might be realized.

Esposito sounds serious about launching not just one metadatarium but a chain of, um, metadataria, and it’s hard to detect any irony when he declares “This chain will be funded through an appeal on Kickstarter, managed with the perfection of Apple, and later taken public on NASDAQ, to the benefit of the 401K plans of its shareholders.“  As of today, however, a search on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, was Metadatariumless. But we’ll keep trying.

One way or another the day of the kiosk will be upon us and it just may look like like Joe Esposito’s brainstorm.

Read it in detail: Joe’s Metadatarium: Creating New Forms of Discovery in the Bricks-and-Mortar World

Richard Curtis

New York, NY, – In a first from a major trade publisher, HarperCollins Publishers today announced “Comprehensive Backlist.” This program will allow all physical bookstores, from the largest to the smallest, to promote and sell the HarperCollins backlist through in-store “Digital-to-Print at Retail” (DPR) using the Espresso Book Machine (EBM). The program will enable bookstores to offer thousands of trade paperback books from the HarperCollins catalog through a mix of traditionally printed books and DPR, as space and cash flow restrictions will no longer be a factor. DPR editions will be sold on an agency model. It is expected that the independent bookstores that already have the Espresso Book Machine in place will join the program.

At launch, HarperCollins will work with On Demand Books, LLC, the maker of the Espresso Book Machine, to enable instant distribution of books that are not currently stocked in stores. With the push of a button, books can be printed, bound, and trimmed to a bookstore-quality, perfect-bound paperback book, with a full-color cover, in minutes.

“Even as digital book sales grow, bookstores continue to be an important place for customers to shop for physical books. The goal of this initiative is to give the local bookseller the capability to provide customers with a greater selection of HarperCollins titles in a physical environment,” said Brian Murray, President and Chief Executive Officer of HarperCollins Publishers. “For authors this is a win; titles will be more broadly available, which increases sales with full print royalties. Depending on the size of the store, 25%-80% of our backlist titles are not stocked due to physical space limitations. DPR technology means the books will be there for the consumer at small and large bookshops.”

“We are delighted to add HarperCollins to the Espresso Book Machine network,” says Dane Neller, Chief Executive Officer of On Demand Books. “By committing thousands of titles to the program, HarperCollins is showing its clear support for bookstores and authors, and reaching more readers. Digital-to-Print at Retail is a powerful new sales channel for publishers. It eliminates lost sales due to out-of-stock inventory and provides a new marketing platform in partnership with bricks and mortar booksellers.”

“The ability to have available any book that our customers could possibly ask for is key to our vision of how to thrive in this challenging environment,” said Jeffrey Mayersohn, Owner of Harvard Bookstore. “The HarperCollins partnership with On Demand Books brings us much closer to realizing that vision. This is great news for independent bookstores everywhere.”

“With HarperCollins making their titles available for the Espresso BookMachine, the original vision and full potential of the machine will begin to be realized. Thousands more titles will be directly available to my customers, and we will capture many, many sales which are currently lost,” said Chris Morrow, Owner of Northshire Bookstore. “I hope other publishers see the potential of this sales channel and get on board. This can be a key element in the development of the bookstore of the future.”

HarperCollins trade paperback books, including adult and children’s titles, will be available on Espresso Book Machines starting in November. Titles from Zondervan and HarperCollins Canada will be available early next year. Booksellers who are interested in exploring HarperCollins “Comprehensive Backlist” offer should contact their HarperCollins sales representative to determine the optimal level of core print books that stores should carry, relevant incentives, and merchandise opportunities. The program will be available to any bricks-and-mortar book retailers. Book retailers can work directly with On Demand Books, or the vendor of their choosing, to install the machine in stores. Booksellers can contact their HarperCollins sales rep for more information.

By our count we’ve written eight or ten articles about e-book and print on demand kiosks, and the same number about the Espresso, the bantamweight book-producing machine that will one day stand at the heart of those kiosks. (See “An ATM For Books”).

Though the technology hasn’t taken off as dramatically as expected, we have never abandoned our confidence that it must inevitably prevail.

Our optimism was reinforced by HarperCollins’ announcement of plans to upload into Espressos some 5000 backlist titles. “The program will enable bookstores to offer thousands of trade paperback books from the HarperCollins catalog through a mix of traditionally printed books and DPR [Digital-to-Print-Retail], as space and cash flow restrictions will no longer be a factor,” declared HarperCollins.

Details here.

RC

No no no! We meant the Espresso printer!

Don Quixote’s demented crusade could not be more – er, quixotic – than our advocacy of print on demand kiosks.  We’ve promoted their installation not merely in bookstores and libraries – the logical place for them – but in such counterintuitive locations as drug stores, truck stops and bagel shops.

With the advent of print on demand technology there is no longer any reason for books to be sold only in bookstores, though certainly bookstores would be a good place to start. We  particularly urge the management of Borders to use its space (what remains of it) as a showroom for a million-book library that can be downloaded or manufactured on the spot.

If you want to see how our promotion of e-book and POD kiosks has nearly deranged us, click on this menu of coocoo articles dedicated to the subject.

Several factors have limited the adoption of POD on a mass commercial basis. One is the ungainly size of the printers (though that has not discouraged the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass.).  Another is the lack of an organized, gung-ho sales force.   These barriers however, may soon come down according to Publisher’s Weekly‘s Judith Rosen.

Rosen reports that “a new partnership with the American Booksellers Association to help get frontlist and midlist titles from mainstream houses (something that has eluded On Demand Books to date), an agreement with HarperCollins for some backlist titles with the promise of new releases at some point in the future, and more involvement from Xerox, the Espresso Book Machine could be poised to become a bookstore staple. The marketing arrangement with Xerox last March gives the On Demand Books a sales force of 4,000, and more financially attractive leasing options for the Espresso Book Machine.”

Which is why, despite our having been knocked off our horse so many times, we are ready to remount and charge the kiosk windmill yet again.

Details in Book Machines Near the Tipping Point?

Richard Curtis

If there’s anything left of Borders when it comes out from under the bankruptcy umbrella, its management will still face the same problems that pulled the company over the precipice in the first place: expensive real estate, slow sales velocity, the unending nightmare of returnability, and two behemoth rivals that dominate both the print and e-book space. Is there anything Borders can do the second time around that will give it a genuinely competitive position in a book world rapidly shifting from tangible to virtual?

Well, if I were in charge of Borders’ reorganization I’d urge the installation of e-book and print on demand kiosks. E-books could be viewed and sampled on the kiosk screen, purchased and downloaded directly into the customer’s Nook, Kindle or smart phone. Printed books?  Like the tiny Harvard Book Store about which we recently wrote, which offers a selection of 4 million titles on its Google-powered virtual bookshelf (every one of them turned face out), Borders could have Espresso Print on Demand presses on the premises that manufacture any book to order in the time it takes customers to have a snack in the coffee shop.  (See NYC Pharmacy Chain Installs DVD Kiosks and I’ll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace.)

Richard Curtis