Right now EBMs are a limited alternative for two reasons. First, the content available is pretty restricted. On Demand Books currently claims a catalog of two million titles on their website, but half of these titles are books that have fallen into public domain. Well it will be nice to print out obscure and out-of-print books, they are most likely not going to sell to a wide audience. The other half of the EBM’s catalog is made of books published by Lightning Source, an on demand (“vanity press”) printing service out of Tennessee. It’s hard to know what to make of the boast “We print over 1 million books every month and our average print run is 1.8 copies,” on Lightning Source’s website. I’m guessing none of those books will appear on the New York Times Best Sellers list anytime soon.
Availability is also hindering the EBM. There are currently only nine in the world, and just four in the US: at the University of Michigan Library, Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont, The Internet Archive in San Francisco, and the New Orleans Public Library. Four more are planned for 2009, but there is a good chance they won’t be in your neighborhood library (one in the US so far, and none in an actual bookstore).
Even if this new model really takes off, a major change is still far away. But in a time of huge budget cuts, lay-offs, and acquisition freezes, the EBM 2.0 may provide a lucrative alternative for publishers. It seems that the publishing world is divided between selling to die-hards, like myself, who still want to feel the pages under their fingers as they read, and those embracing ereaders (and looking smarter for it every day). But the EBM may actually use digital content not as a stake to drive through the heart of the physical book, as ereaders are often portrayed, but to make selling physical books feasible to publishing companies, profitable to the authors who write them, and available to the readers who still want to read a book page-by-actual-page in the old and familiar format.
Here’s the EBM in action:
