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HarperCollinsChristianPublishing, comprised of both Thomas Nelson, Inc. (@ThomasNelson) and Zondervan (@Zondervan), is now making its titles available through On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel.

Tom Knight, HarperCollinsChristianPublishing senior vice president of sales, says, “The Espresso Book Machine will significantly enhance a customer’s in-store experience by giving bricks-and-mortar retailers the ability to offer an almost endless supply of books.”

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 carry out the store immediately.

Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over 7 million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogs 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 ereaders.

Read this in full.

See the pdf news release.

See the pdf news release, “Penguin Titles Coming to an Espresso Book Machine Near You.”

Also see our blogposts tagged “Print on Demand” and “A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

Members of Somersault were pleased to give the keynote presentation Jan. 9 at the CBA Next 2013 (@ICRShow) event held in cooperation with AmericasMart Atlanta (@AmericasMartATL) in the Atlanta gift mart.

We distributed our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now” and our Christian Bookstore Customer Satisfaction Survey. Both are available online.

We encouraged Christian retailers to brand themselves as more than sellers of product, but as experts in Christian publishing. And to declare their expertise by referring to their bookstore as a “Books Bistro” with “Publishing Einsteins,” so when a customer wants to learn about a Christian topic or write about one, the first expert advisor he or she should think of consulting is their store.

Christian Retailing (@ChristianRetail) covered our presentation:

Seventy percent of Christian store shoppers say they would buy an ebook at a Christian retail store, with many options now available to Christian market retailers, according to publishing strategy and services agency Somersault Group....

Creating an in-store experience that will draw traffic is critical. The panel urged Christian retailers to cultivate an atmosphere that promotes relaxation, provides real-time marketing and offers information openly that reassures customers in their purchase decisions. Stores were also encouraged to assign a staff member to event management and another to digital communication.

“Be the Christian hub of your community,” the panel told NEXT attendees. “Christian booksellers are no longer only in the bookselling business. You are in the community-building, personalized-service, outcome-based-solution-provider, experts-in-all-things-publishing-related and technology business with a spiritual emphasis.”

Read this in full.

Learn more about this retail report in the upcoming March issue of Christian Retailing.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.

All facets of publishing are changing exponentially. Printing has gone way beyond mere ink and paper. CNN reports that a Dutch architect wants to print a house.

Architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars describes his $5-$6 million "Landscape House" as "one surface folded in an endless Mobius band," or sort of a giant figure 8. He says walking through its continuous looping design will seamlessly merge indoors and outdoors in an effort to model nature itself.

Ruijssenaars plans to build "Landscape House" using the emerging technology of 3-D printing, where 20-foot by 30-foot blocks are printed out of sand formed into a material like marble. Those blocks, along with fiberglass and concrete reinforcements, will be used to create the building.

Read this in full.

You may also be interested in reading (and seeing the video at) "Printing 3D Buildings: Five tenets of a new kind of architecture" and "Staples announces in-store 3D printing service."

Also see our previous blogposts “3D Printing a Gun” and “PaperTab: A Tablet As Flexible As Paper,” and others tagged “Future.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Future tab.

A report by Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) for paidContent (@paidContent) says, “On Demand Books, the company behind the Espresso Book Machine (@espressobook), and Kodak (@kodakCB) are partnering to add print-on-demand technology to Kodak Picture Kiosks (@KodakKiosks) [of which there are 105,000 nationwide]. That means consumers will be able to print paperback photo books, self-published books, and the seven million backlist and public domain titles in On Demand’s catalog from retail chains such as CVS (@CVSCaremarkFYI).”

Read the paidContent article.

About 30 Espresso Book Machines are installed in stores around the US, with 30 more being readied for installation.

HarperCollinsPublishers (@HarperCollins) says it will make about 5,000 current paperbacks available through the Espresso Book Machine.

Read The Wall Street Journal article.

On Demand also announced a partnership with ReaderLink (@Readerlink), which distributes books to grocery stores, drugstores, mass market and club stores, to make more titles available through the Kodak Picture Kiosks.

“We envision an integrated solution that can substantially redefine the publishing industry and bring exciting new solutions to customers," says Dane Neller, CEO of On Demand Books.

Read the news release.

But according to USA TODAY (@usatodaytech), "this all comes with one huge catch — Kodak is in the midst of selling its photo kiosk business as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy."

Neller said the Kodak agreement, though announced [Sept. 12], was signed before the Rochester printing and imaging company announced last month it had decided to sell a set of businesses that include its photo kiosks, document scanners and still camera film operations. He said On Demand's hope is that whatever company buys Kodak's kiosk operations would also continue the Espresso arrangement.

Read the USA TODAY article.

See our previous blogposts “Mardel Acquires Espresso Book Machine” and “3D Printing a Gun.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you navigate the fast-changing world of book publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Here’s a new page in the print-on-demand saga and its growing impact on book publishing (see our previous blogpost, “Mardel Acquires Espresso Book Machine"): 3D printing. There may be innovative applications for publishers to consider for print books, especially in light of the current capability to 3D print a functional human jaw and a working gun made out of resin.

Jonathan Zittrain (@zittrain), author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (book) (blog), professor of law at Harvard Law School (@Harvard_Law), and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University (@berkmancenter), says

Resin is the toner of the modern 3D printer. No doubt 3D printers will come to be able to commonly use other raw ingredients. There's no reason they couldn't be someday in the mainstream metals and all sorts of forms of porcelain, but in this case we're talking plastic.

Read this in full at Marketplace Tech (@MarketplaceAPM).

Another foray into the future is the possibility that smartphones will be fashioned into glasses, and the opportunities this may bring to publishers.

"This idea of wearing glasses and being able to see data as we walk around is where I think things are heading," says Brian Chen (@bxchen), columnist for The New York Times Bits blog (@nytimesbits) and author of Always On: How the iPhone Unlocked the Anything-Anytime-Anywhere Future—and Locked Us In. And once the interface for glasses is less intrusive, he noted, the potential use cases are wide open. “Say you were giving a speech," he said. "Glasses could serve as a teleprompter."

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you sort out the fast-changing world of publishing.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Futurist news tab.

Mardel (@Mardel_Inc) retail chain has 35 stores in 7 states. Its store in Oklahoma City, OK is now “one of the first Christian bookstores that has a newly-installed Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), technology that offers patrons instant access to more than 8 million titles printed in any language, and allows area Oklahoma authors to self-publish their work on-site.”

“Now people have a source to print-on-demand all types of books in any language and genres, and to publish their own professional or personal writings,” said Kevin McDonell, merchandise manager of Mardel.

The EBM is “the only digital-to-print at retail solution on the market. With the push of a button, any book from EspressNet®, On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) digital catalog of content, can be printed, bound and trimmed, creating a paperback book that is virtually indistinguishable from the publisher’s version.“

Read the news release (pdf).

Last November, Baker Publishing Group (@ReadBakerBooks) became the first major Christian publisher  to make available almost its entire paperback list to the EBM network.

Read the news release (pdf).

Espresso Book Machine location list.

In other digital news, Publishers Weekly reports:

Zondervan (@Zondervan), the evangelical Christian publishing division of HarperCollins, has begun a new direct-to-digital imprint. Zondervan First (@ZondervanFirst) launches with the acquisition of a historical fiction title, Love in Three-Quarter Time by Dina Sleiman. The digital titles will be produced with editorial and marketing support from Zondervan.

Zondervan First will initially focus on fiction but will eventually include all the categories the company currently publishes. Submissions will be accepted for fiction, non-fiction, and Bible material suitable for kids, teens, and adults in addition to manuscripts geared for curriculum, church resources, academic, and reference books.

Zondervan First will not pay an advance, but authors will receive a 25% royalty from the first book sold. After an ebook sells 10,000 net copies, the author's royalty rate rises to 50%.

Read the news release.

And Alive Communications literary agency for Christian and inspirational titles has launched “a sister epublishing company, Bondfire Books (@BondfireBooks).“

“We aim to be a game changer by working with other literary agencies and paying all authors a 50% net royalty, essentially double the industry standard of 25%. We will also offer 5-year renewable terms instead of the normal life of copyright,” says Rick Christian (@RicklyChristian), founder of Bondfire Books and Alive Communications.

Read the news release.

Somersault (@smrsault) is here to help publishers and other content creators communicate their messages digitally and in print.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.