Presses Large and Small

Last week my roommate Camber (also an editor) and I walked all over Manhattan looking at publishing houses. Well, peering in the front windows really. We set out to find Simon & Schuster, Random House, and HarperCollins, and along the way also saw a number of the non-trade publishers—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and half a dozen news corporations, and walked past the so-influential New York Public Library. I knew publishing was all in New York (which had the historical good fortune of a great harbor that gave quick access to book shipments from England), but I had no idea they were so close together. We gazed at the impressive book display in the lobby at Random House and for lunch chose a café with windows that looked directly onto HarperCollins.

Last week I glimpsed this most impressive collection of corporate trade publishing; yesterday I stopped in at the Harvard Book Store (no affiliation with Harvard except proximity, I’m told) to admire their brand new Paige M. Gutenborg: a print on demand machine that Jason Epstein predicts will be the future face of book publishing. This enhanced laser printer prints from electronic files (at this point mostly scanned books on GoogleBooks) and wraps them up in a quick perfectbind to create your paperback in a matter of minutes. I watched one print job go through the process and paged through some others on display. The binding is sure to fall apart as any cheap paperback will, and the print quality varied widely, depending on the quality of the electronic file, from very fuzzy to nearly indistinguishable from offset. This emerging technology is the book equivalent of an iPod: instead of choosing from among the CDs offered at your local music store or ordering one you especially like, you can choose the music you like most, even songs performed by groups who sing to such niche markets it wouldn’t be profitable to print CDs, and download it immediately. The technology is going to take some refining, but I won’t be surprised to see many more of these sorts of printers rising to supplement the large print runs of books coming out of the New York houses.