Digital
library: This Paris store prints books on demand in 5 min
authier Charrier, a student, stepped
inside one of Paris's newest bookstores and wondered, “Where are all the
books?“ “I saw this empty , open space -just a couple of stools -and I
wondered, `Did someone mess up?'“ Charrier said.
None messed up.
The
pronounced stock shortage inside the Librairie des Puf, run by the publisher
University Press of France, or Les Puf for short, is not the result of an
ordering mistake, but the heart of the shop's business model. There are books,
but they are not delivered in advance from wholesalers. They are printed on
request, before the customer's very eyes, on an Espresso Book Machine. On
Demand Books, the company that manufactures the machine, chose the name as a
nod to an activity you can complete in the five minutes it takes to print a
book: Have a quick coffee.
Labelled,
not so modestly , the “Gutenberg press of the 21st century“ by its creators,
the machine sits in a back corner of the shop, humming as it turns PDFs into
paperbacks. Customers use tablets to select the titles for print -adding, if
they want to, their own handwritten inscriptions -while sipping coffee in the
light and airy storefront in the Latin Quarter of Paris. “The customers are all
surprised,“ said the shop's director, Alexandre Gaudefroy . “At first, they're
a little uncomfortable with the tablets. After all, you come to a bookshop to
look at books. But thanks to the machine and the tablets, the customer holds a
digital library in their hands.“
Gaudefroy
said, “I don't have to worry about space for the stock and I can offer readers
as many titles as I want.“ And that is a lot of titles. All 5,000 books
published by Les Puf are available, as well as an additional three million
books compiled by On Demand Books, including titles from 10 large American
publishers and the public domain.
Les
Puf 's prestige in the industry has helped it secure even more titles. “What's
really exciting is that, thanks to the on-demand model, we can revive old
titles, which we previously hadn't bothered with because they'd only sell five
or 10 copies in a year,“ Mr. Gaudefroy said.“On-demand, it's a new economy for
us.“
Source | Times of India | 14 June 2016
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan
& Co
Best
Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on
Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23,
2016. The title of the paper is “Removing
Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”
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