U. of Arizona Prints Books on Demand

Date: February 18, 2010

New York, NY -- At the University of Arizona (UA), they are working on a solution that they hope will not only benefit the environment, but their students as well. From a story on the UA Daily Wildcat, back in October the UA Bookstore purchased an Espresso Book Machine 2.0 from On Demand Books. The purchase makes them the second customer among colleges in the United States with the only previous buyer being the University of Missouri bookstore.

The book machine is capable of printing, binding, and cutting paperback books one at a time. It consists of three major components: a laser printer that makes the book block, a book cover printer, and then a unit that puts the other two parts together.

UA hopes that this will enable them to save money on textbook printing. Not only will it help the bookstore out by printing only the books they need and also saves the publishers money in staff time and materials needed to produce and ship these books. If they run out, they can always make more as well.

To obtain a book, the customer first selects the title from the computer and the pages are transferred into the printer from one side and the cover comes from the other. The pages are printed, clamped together, and rotates them so the spine faces the cover. Once that is done, the glue that will bind the pages to the book is rolled down the spine from a melted cylinder and is clamped into the book. All of the edges are cut down to the proper size and excess paper is recycled.

The costs of running the machine are around a penny per page. However, the press itself retails for around $97,500 plus the cost of the printers.

The bookstore is partnering with the school’s university press and the libraries to produce books that are no longer in print. This technology is able to bring those books “back to life”, says Chris Schafer of the UA Bookstore.

This equipment may also allow for future partnerships with self-publishing authors who want to be in control of how many copies they print instead of having the number driven by a book publisher. The whole procedure of printing a book takes roughly 5 minutes.

BY ADAM HAIGH, Editor