HP can't save print industry, but big props for trying
Hewlett-Packard is announcing two projects Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit that it hopes will give new life to print--books and magazines in particular.
BookPrep and MagCloud let content that's been too expensive or difficult to print reach readers more easily.
Andrew Bolwell, director of new business initiatives at HP, told me these products are based on an understanding that the publishing industry is undergoing a fundamental shift--which he sees as the move away from printing items ahead of time, distributing them to locations in the hopes that people will buy them, and then disposing of the products that are unsold--into the more contemporary model of printing on demand. Each year in the U.S., 2 billion magazines, or 62 percent of all those printed, end up unsold and in landfills, Bolwell said.
Books are printed in advance in the same way, for the most part, and unsold copies are likewise destroyed. Furthermore, most of the books ever printed are unavailable to buy: Bolwell said only 4 percent of the 90 million books ever printed are available to purchase.
BookPrep
HP is set to rescue old books, making them fit to print again.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)HP's BookPrep is built to address that. The service takes in scans of book pages, cleans them up automatically, and preps them for sale as print-on-demand paperback editions.
The service, which has been in testing for about a year at a university library, is getting some high-profile partners and a business model. The service now gets scanned books from Google and from the Internet Archive, and sells its books on Amazon.com.
The books are printed by various on-demand book printing houses. The covers are done on HP Indigo printers, but the book pages themselves are created on who-knows-what printer. Bolwell doesn't care, as the revenue comes from the sale of the books via Amazon royalties. HP said it will share a portion of its revenue with the source of each book's scan--in most cases, a library.
Unlike the Archive's more disruptive Book Server project, which is about making current books available online, BookPrep is about older, public-domain books. And the BookPrep service does not index the actual text in books--it leaves that to Google, Amazon, and the Internet Archive. All BookPrep does is take crufty scans of old books and make them presentable enough for print. It also can create nice covers for print editions.
So if you want a print edition of the 1887 White House Cook Book, this is how a surviving, aging copy of the book can appear new again.
MagCloud
The company also has a way for today's magazine publishers to print for less.
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)The MagCloud business addresses magazine printing. It's a custom magazine printing site, like Lulu but for glossy magazines, that's been live since February. The service lets people create their own print publication and customize single copies for users based on location or other factors. When a reader buys an issue, MagCloud prints a copy at a printer as close to the person's location as possible to save shipping costs and time.
The new addition to the product is a link into Wikia community sites. Users can now print "magazines" of Wikia pages, and the service will format them so they look nice. It reminds me of Offbeat Guides to an extent.
MagCloud isn't a complete magazine publishing system in the sense that it helps people create periodical publications. It doesn't do subscription management nor does it automate print advertising. But it does look like a nice way to get a fancy-looking color magazine-like publication created and distributed easily.
MagCloud publications are printed on HP's Indigo printers.
Taping up old pages
Bolwell has a modern yet conflicted appreciation for print, which is not surprising for someone who works at a one of the largest printer manufacturers. He believes that people will continue to love and want printed products and that, "especially for rich four-color content, the experience of the printed page is the preferred way of reading content." However, he also believes that the process for creating a printed product must change: "It's only a matter of time until the entire (magazine) industry moves to print on demand," he adds.
Both BookPrep and MagCloud seem to be Band-Aids for likely terminal patients. The demand for printed books and magazines won't vanish tomorrow. Nor will the demand for newspapers evaporate suddenly, though that's an industry even Bolwell doesn't think printing technology should try to fix.
The question is to what level the book and magazine printing industries, even streamlined, will decline, and how fast they will get there. I hope Bolwell has exit plans for this business, and I don't mean selling it to Google.
Rafe Needleman writes about start-ups, new technologies, and Web 2.0 products, as editor of CNET's Webware. E-mail Rafe. 
Just because a few magazines and some papers are no longer with us, doesn't mean that all of them are going to switch to non-print publication over night. We are a long way from wiping out books and magazines contrary to what these people think. Long live print media!
Taking an eBook to the beach sounds oh-so-cool, until you realize that beaches are wet, sandy, hot, way too sunny, etc.
I can leave a magazine laying on the seat of the car without wondering if someone is going to break in and run off with the thing, or wondering if I shut the 'zine off or not.
I know that I can read a novel for an entire transpacific flight, without having to go look for a charging port or for batteries.
What if the Dead Sea Scrolls were originally on an eBook? How the hell would you bring the thing back to life and figure out how to get the contents, assuming the data didn't "rot" as well? How would archaeologist even know it was a book/scroll in the first place? (Okay, maybe we should project forward to some future archaeologist trying to figure out what the hell a Kindle is?)
Dead Tree is going to be around for a lot longer, and I daresay that it currently remains the best way of storing information long-term, and taking it around with you.
Today, I buy a book, read it, then I can put it on my shelf to pull out years or even decades from now to read. Or, I can pass it along to a friend to read, even keep. I can resell it to second hand book store or donate it to a library or charity that provides used books to the less fortunate.
The point being is that I have full control over the future existence of that book, but not with the digital analogues. I understand that they need some mechanism to prevent wholesale copying, since people have proven themselves to have the morals of a common criminal when it comes to digital assets, but if it reduces my current rights and capabilities compared with the physical purchase, then it is a no go for me.
Also, it should be in a standard format instead of a proprietary format that the seller will quit supporting the second the revenue drys up or the next bright shiny object comes along. I say this as I look at an original edition of Caves of Steel by Issac Asimov sitting on my bookshelf that was printed in 1954. Let's see if you will be able to read your Kindle purchases in 2063. Doubt it.
There is one advantage that electronic publishing gives you though. Many magazines include material that you just aren't interested in. Breaking the material down into wanted and unwanted content can make it much easier to catalog and retain. It also ondenses the space it uses on your drives. However if you can't access it long into the future, it's value is vastly diminished.
The specific edition I have was printed in 1896 - well over 113 years ago. The book was written and first published in 1870: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Proctor
Now, given its fairly low mass-sales appeal, and its age, why would anyone bother to put it in an eBook?
None of the book technologies are going away, including good old fashioned Gutenberg. The proportions of market share will just change. Just like radio didn't eliminate newspapers and TV didn't wipe out either, eBooks and on-demand will not wipe out mass produced/distributed paper books and magazines. The changing proportions will certaily impact their respective business economics and there will be winners and losers. Some market segments will be drastically reduced.
As for the luddite arguments about eBooks, it's all rubbish. Every detractor of eBooks and the Kindle I've met don't use one. Those that have an open mind and use one realize that they are far superior to classic books in many (but not all) ways and have an important place In the information distribution ecosystem.
If there's a vast disparity in price between the electronic and physical media, some folks will trade off the future proofing for convenience.
Hahahahaha!
Rafe, please avoid using .PNG images, they are slow to load and particularly useless in this case.
...that's because you're likely using IE on Windows to read it. ;)
As for home printing, I regularly print out newspaper articles for other to read. I have an HP monochrome laser printer, which is perfectly suited to that task.
- by professionaladventurer October 21, 2009 8:34 AM PDT
- I was hoping for an article on printer cartridges. HP is killing too. So I am going to have write this anyway: I weighted 74 black ($9.99) and 74 XL Black (27.99) and weighed an empty 74. YOU DO NOT GET THREE TIMES AS MUCH INK & My printers are always saying the ink is low regardless is the cartridge is new or not.
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(15 Comments)Maybe I have a bone to pick with HP.