University of Michigan Library Installs On Demand Books's Espresso Book Machine

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 9/25/2008 1:43:00 AM

• UM first academic library with Espresso Book Machine
• Machine will be used for digitized public domain works
• Cost: about $10 per book

The University of Michigan (UM) Library this week became the first academic library to install an Espresso Book Machine (EBM), from On Demand Books, a machine that can produce a quality paperback book on demand, in about five minutes, for roughly $10 per book. (For more on Print-on-Demand services see the spring 2008 issue of netConnect).

Perhaps no educational institution in the United States has been more aggressive in its digitization efforts than the UM Library, which has devoted significant resources to homegrown scanning efforts, as well as a comprehensive (and somewhat controversial) deal with Google to scan its entire book collection. But with its (EBM), Michigan officials are revealing the next phase of the digital revolution—a phase where all of its public domain digitized materials begin to find their way back into print, via on-demand, customizable books. “Some of the time, an electronic book that can be accessed any time, anywhere, and quickly searched is exactly what we need,” Maria Bonn, director of UM Libraries Scholarly Publishing Office told the LJ Academic Newswire. “At other times, the ideal form of the book is a nicely bound copy.”

The machine, located in the lobby of UM’s Shapiro Library, lists for a cool $100,000—although Bonn says UM, while not at liberty to disclose the price, did receive a discount, and that the unit was purchased with donations. Beginning Oct. 1, the EBM will be fully operational, and eventually will offer reprints of any public domain titles from the library’s digitized collection of nearly two million books, as well as thousands of books available from the Open Content Alliance.

“We’ll be starting this fall with a relatively small stock of titles as we define our suite of services,” Bonn said, “but we intend to offer many thousands, pretty much anything we can do while staying within the legal constraints of copyright and the physical constraints of the machine,” [page length, trim size, etc.]. In the coming months, for example, the library says it hopes to work with faculty to put their out-of-print books back into print, and are exploring other educational uses.

“Our first priority for the EMB is to produce inexpensive reprints of the digitized public domain materials from our collection,” Bonn told LJAN, making these inexpensive reprints available to anyone who can get to the university to pick up a book. “We don’t plan on doing any shipping,” Bonn added, “although we are considering ways in which we might integrate the reprint option into ILL.” For example, many of Michigan’s books are already available on Amazon.com. The library will only offer books in the public domain or that it otherwise has permission to print.

UM librarian Paul Courant, meanwhile, said the EBM, by creating on-demand print books, will help realize the full power of digitization. In 2009, the next wave of EBMs will roll out, which will include the ability to network, meaning that rare Michigan library books will be able to be printed remotely at libraries or storefronts anywhere. “Digital and print versions work in tandem,” Courant noted, “and soon researchers anywhere in the world will be able to browse UM's digitized holdings, select a book from our out of copyright collections, and have the book printed within minutes.”