Thanks for adding your perspectives. I think there’s a lot of good possibilities – but the idea of watching Amazon and Google duke it out like Godzilla and King Kong, trampling small publishing underfoot as they thrash around, isn’t my idea of a good time

I wouldn’t worry too much about amazon.com dominating the book market. The Google Book Settlement will bring a new and enormous player into the arena. But in addition to this, the little “David,” the Espresso Book Machine, will perhaps have an even bigger impact.

See my new article on “Micro-Publishing” at: http://musingsofcorsonf.blogspot.com/2009/03/micro-publishing.html

For university presses, cost-effective POD services have been a major boon in the past 5 years or so. Rather than playing a guessing game (print 1000, sell 600, pulp or remainder the rest), we can now print for the short term (first year or so) and then reprint in small amounts as needed. This saves paper and money (given fewer inventory items to manage.)

These books may very well be sold through conventional book stores. Many publishers use LightningSource as well as Amazon’s supplier for POD. LS is part of Ingram, a book wholesaler from whom many small bookshops order their stock. These close relationships (between Amazon and their POD vendor, BookSurge, or between Ingram and LS) show how businesses evolve to control the vertical production chain. This is capitalism at work, for good or ill, or a combination of both.

On Barbara’s larger point, there are also several businesses springing up that could potentially support library book sales — Lulu or Blurb, who were founded to enable self-publishing, but who support online sales and distribution of print books. I suspect they’d be happy to start conversations with libraries about how they could collaborate on efforts similar to what Penn and Emory are doing with Amazon. (The book-scanning piece would have to be addressed separately.) Another solution in place at the U of Michigan is an Espresso Book Machine, for the truly one-off print on demand copy–it takes about 10 minutes to make a reasonably well-bound conventional paperback book. I believe that Lightning Source titles (that is, books whose publishers use LS for their POD) can be purchased on an Espresso. http://www.ondemandbooks.com

I envision a day when a lot of libraries and college bookstores share an Espresso. The library could use it to sell copies of scanned items from their collection, content from their Institutional Repository, or other library-published items (say, journals or conference proceedings from that university). The bookstore could use it for books that have been assigned to their students. Ideally, publishers would even offer chapters or articles for sale in this way, so coursepacks could be made for students who preferred print. (In my fantasy, all of this is done at a reasonable price, that covers the cost of providing this custom-made printed copy.)

Currently Amazon certainly makes it very easy and appealing to find, explore, and buy POD copies. As early investors in this area, they have great advantages. But we are not limited to them.

On the one hand, POD services offer a reasonable cost option for small authors who can’t attract a regular publisher, without requiring them to order an initial print run of several thousand books. I have an uncle who is researching and writing about our family ancestry, and my father is writing a collection of his memoirs. These books that are unlikely to be of interest outside our family and maybe a small circle of friends. Amazon’s POD service offers them an option to “publishing” on CD-ROM – allowing them to create something that can become a nice keepsake in the family library.

On the other hand, you raise an excellent point about the impact (particularly when libraries enter into the sort of partnerships you describe) on local independent booksellers, which are really hurting as a result of megachains like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. We lost the best independent bookstore in my community several years ago, and longtime locals still miss it. Now we seem to be limited to Borders, B&N, and a couple of small specialty bookstores – with the latter usually combined with coffee shops in order to stay in business. It’s a real loss for the community.

I have no good solution for this problem, but I think you are correct in cautioning libraries to think about the impact of such arrangements on their local booksellers. I’m not sure how much of a revenue stream POD arrangements with publishers like Amazon provide to libraries (and I’ve never known a public library that couldn’t use a little extra money, since libraries seem to be a favorite target when cities have to cut their budgets), but you’ve certainly provided some excellent food for thought.