Penguin titles coming to an Espresso Book Machine near you
New York, NY – Penguin Group (USA), a leader in adult and children’s trade publishing, has joined On Demand Books’ growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) program, making its titles available through EBM’s “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel.
“We are excited about this new partnership with On Demand Books,” says Doug Whiteman, Penguin Group (USA) Executive Vice President Business Operations. “Penguin is always looking for new ways to bring our writers to readers and On Demand Books gives us another channel to further fulfill that mission. We are grateful to have this opportunity to extend the way we serve our booksellers, authors and readers.”
“We are thrilled that Penguin has joined our program and that we can now offer both our current retailers and our future mass-retail partners such quality titles,” says Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books. “Penguin has a rich and diverse backlist that stores cannot fully stock, and with EBM’s patented technology, will now allow retailers to offer these to their customers.”
The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and walk out the store with right there and then.
Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over seven million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogues books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for e-readers.
The EBM provides a new sales channel for publishers, and vastly increases the availability of titles for physical bookstores, significantly reducing loss of sales due to books being out-of-stock. In addition, the EBM technology offers libraries and bricks-and-mortar retailers the opportunity to become community self-publishing centers, providing a new distribution platform for self-published authors. And of course the EBM improves overall efficiency and environmental sustainability by eliminating shipping and the return and pulping of unwanted books.