Self Publishing at Book Santa Cruz Using the Espresso Book Machine

Casey Protti and the new Espresso Book Machine at Bookshop Santa Cruz

Today we are going to speak with Casey Protti, owner of Bookshop Santa Cruz, one of the truly iconic independent bookstores in America. The bookshop just acquired an Espresso Book Machine, a new technology which is able to create a perfect bound paperback book in minutes. The quality of the books produced are indistinguishable from paperbacks published by major publishers.  It’s a new technology that has the potential of redefining the role of local bookstores.

Andy: Casey, Can you tell us a little bit about the Espresso Book Machine.

Casey:  I’m really excited about our new machine. It is a remarkable technology that allows Bookshop Santa Cruz to print books on site, and on demand.  We can just hit a button and it prints, binds, and trims a paperback book in just a few minutes. What I love about this technology is not only the convenience factor of being able to give a customer a book when they want it, but more importantly, our ability to become a community publishing center- a place to have human to human interactions to create and distribute books.

Andy: The machine allows the local bookstore to become a self-publishing venue? Really.  Tell us about that.

books printed and bound in 5 minutes on the Espresso Book Machine

Casey: For those authors who have a novel or memoir or book of poetry that they want to make into book form, we can help them to bring their work to life through every step of the publishing process.  And not just people who think of themselves as authors. This could mean people who want to create family histories, compilations of family recipes, businesses who want to customize journals, student groups who want to make zines or graphic novels, or teachers who want to put together an anthology of their students’ work.

Andy: Other than self-publishing, what else can you do?

Casey: There are 8 million titles available including works in the public domain and hard to find and self-published titles.  Just the other day we had a man who had been searching for a hard to find book for over 20 years in used bookstores.  We had it on the EBM and printed it for him in 5 minutes.  Although other stores with Espresso Book Machines have seen self-publishing account for 80-90% of all the activity on the machine, more and more publishers understand the EBM as a good way of keeping their backlists available.

Andy:  That’s a good point. It seems to me that as publishers get more commercial and media –obsessed, they are putting their slower moving back list titles out of print faster. Will Espresso change that?

Casey: I think publishers see the EBM as good way of keeping their backlists available even if demand for a given title has waned. It’s economical for them, because they don’t have to warehouse titles or incur shipping and handling costs.  With EBM  we only produce as many copies as are sold.   We want to be able to sell a book that a customer asks for right away. It is of huge benefit to us, to publishers, and to the customer. And he gets the book a lot faster than he would if he purchased it online. And   we’d love to bring books back in print that have local significance and could sell well to the community but that may not  warrant a traditional print run.

Andy: What’s the quality of the books produced by the Espresso?

Casey: Books produced on the EBM are virtually indistinguishable from traditionally produced paperbacks.

Andy: Some people have said that this is a real transformative technology. Can you tell us what this means.

Casey: Six years ago, when I took over Bookshop from my father, I could never have imagined a technology like this.   In the age of the Internet,  our customers are looking for instant gratification, but also personalized services that you can’t get online. The EBM plays to the typical strengths of indie bookstores in terms of community connections and relationships with local authors but then brings it further with new products and services that meet new customer needs.  Our hope is that as more publishers add content to the EBM, we will one day be able to say that we can print any book ever published on demand.  That’s transformative!

Andy: What about ebooks? Aren’t they going to make print on paper books obsolete? That would make the Espresso machine a kind of dead end technology.

Casey: It has been  fun to see people  so excited at watching a physical book being made. Seeing this excitement puts to rest the idea that the book is dead.  Although people rightly want to publish their books electronically, they’d be shooting themselves in the foot if they didn’t also want people to see their books in physical form in bookstores.   Publishers will tell you that local bookstores are the showrooms for books. Online  stores can’t duplicate that experience.

Andy: Let’s say that you want to use the machine to publish your own book. What do you need to bring to the bookstore?

Casey: The EBM machine prints from PDF files that authors can either choose to format themselves (following the EBM submission guidelines) or by getting help from their local EBM operator.

Andy: And how about distribution of the book after it has been printed? Is the store involved in this?

Casey: Authors using the EBM can upload their titles to the main EspressNet catalog making their work available at other EBM locations worldwide and  authors printing their books  at Bookshop Santa Cruz can also enroll in the consignment program to have their books added to the shelves of our store.

Andy: How will Espresso allow Bookshop Santa Cruz to compete with companies like Lightening Source and Create Space?

Casey: The self-publishing services we offer are much more one-on-one and personalized then most of the online self-publishing companies. We can walk through a project with an author insuring that we are able to assess and meet all his needs from cover design to purchasing an ISBN number. The authors never need to go it alone. They can easily reach their local EBM operator for trouble-shooting help and project support in person, over the phone or via email.  This part of the EBM service package is completely in line with what indie bookstores do best – building relationships, customizing services, and providing that human connection that you can’t get online.

Andy: How much does a book cost per copy?

Casey: The base printing price for the EBM is $5.00 + 4.5 cents a page, although we do offer some bulk discounts and price breaks depending on the nature of the project.  We also have publishing packages which include various levels of service including graphic design, proof copies, obtaining an ISBN, etc.

Andy: How long have you been operating the machine in the story? How much business has it been generating.

Casey: The Bookshop Santa Cruz EBM has been operational for about a month, and on a typical day we print anywhere from 20-50 books.

Andy: I hear that these machines are incredibly expensive. How much do they cost? Will they really support a viable business model?

Casey: Typically the machine, software and installation runs $100,00-$125,000. American Booksellers Association members receive a discount on the software.  With just over a month under our belt, it is too soon to determine profitability.  However, since the opportunities to connect with the community to publish works are endless, we think there is a good chance that the machine will be a profit center for the store.  In addition, the feeling amongst your customers that the store is trying to remain relevant and innovate is priceless. Since the margin is so small on books, bookstores of the future need to move further into a service-based model in order to survive.  This is a step in the right direction.

Andy: If you want to find out more about the Espresso machine or if you have a self-publishing project and want to work with the Bookshop, call Sylvie Drescher at the Bookshop at 831-460-3258  or email her at ebm@bookshopsantacruz.com.

Thanks, Casey. We’ll check back in a few months to see how this new technology is unfolding.

Bookselling in the Eighties 1

Most independent booksellers who have been in business for awhile will tell you that the 1980s was the golden age for the independent store. And it  most certainly was for the large independents that came to dominate the book business for a short period of time. There weren’t very many of us, and we came in many shapes and sizes. But the stores  had an immense influence on book publishing and  literary culture.  Along with Cody’s,  there was Powell’s Books in Portland and Tattered Cover in Denver. Both were huge stores even by today’s standards, each over 60,000 square feet. Closer to home, there was our sister store, Kepler’s in Silicon Valley, Bookshop Santa Cruz down the coast, and Book Passage in Marin.   

There were some smaller stores as well. Book Soup on the Sunset Strip in LA., Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City., Left Bank Books in St. Louis, City Lights in San Francisco, The Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, and Schwartz’s in Milwaukee (of all places).   It was difficult to pinpoint the qualities that made these stores so beloved and so important to our culture. They were all very different kinds of stores serving very different kinds of communities. That was, after all, what made independent stores so fascinating.  I suppose the only unifying principle that made these stores so important and such a pleasure to shop in was that they were all characterized by a kind of charismatic leadership by the  owners who had a passion for books. Somehow you just knew it when you walked in.

Book publishers like to classify their titles into “frontlist” and “backlist”. The frontlist is the expression used for new titles,  usually but not always in hardback, that have just been released. The backlist is what we call the  books that have been published for some time.  It is a little bit of a fuzzy line that determines when front list becomes backlist, but at some point, and certainly when it goes into paperback after a year,  the book becomes backlist.  Publishers love the backlist. Why shouldn’t they? Backlist books sell year after year with almost no cost to the publisher  for publicity and promotion. The editorial and acquisition costs have been fully amortized. The publisher need do no more than project sales into the future and schedule additional print runs. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is backlist. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond is backlist. Mastering The Art of French Cooking by Julia Child is backlist. But when Knopf issued a new edition of the classic cookbook to coincide with the release of the movie, Julie and Julia, it became frontlist.

In 1980 the vast number of books that we sold were from the backlist. Not just the classics and the scholarly titles, but popular fiction, books by authors like:, Frank Herbert, Margaret Atwood, Tom Robbins,  and Isabel Allende were  evergreen titles that sold year after year.

Let’s look at the bestselling titles of 1980.

FICTION 

1. The Covenant, James A. Michener

2. The Bourne Identity, Robert Ludlum

3. Rage of Angels, Sidney Sheldon

4. Princess Daisy, Judith Krantz

5. Firestarter, Stephen King

6. The Key to Rebecca, Ken Follett

7. Random Winds, Belva Plain

8. The Devil’s Alternative, Frederick Forsyth

9. The Fifth Horseman, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre

10. The Spike, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss

N O N F I C T I O N

1. Crisis Investing, Douglas Casey

2. Cosmos, Carl Sagan

3. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement, Milton and Rose Friedman

4. Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, Norman Cousins

5. Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese

6. The Sky’s the Limit, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

7. The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler

8. Craig Claiborne’s Gourmet Diet, Craig Claiborne with Pierre Franey

9. Nothing Down, Robert Allen

10. Shelley: Also Known as Shirley, Shelley Winters

Compare this list to the one from 1972 [see my previous post. “How I Became a Bookseller.”]  It seems to me that the titles on this list are a lot more commercial than they were back then. This coincides with new trends in publishing. Publishers were changing from cottage industries to big business.  Big publishers were buying up smaller publishers, and big  integrated media conglomerates were buying up big publishers. And books were increasingly being marketed by mass merchants to mass audiences.

 When I bought the store in 1977, there was  a small press table at the very front of store. The titles on the table were poetry and some literary broadsides  by lesser known or local writers.   Most of them  weren’t all that good or interesting and didn’t sell very well either. But Fred Cody had a sort of sentimental attachment to the idea.  In 1980 I  moved the display of the small presses  to the middle of the store closer to the poetry section. I thought of it as a practical decision. The table was pretty prominent real estate. And it just might make sense to display books that customers actually wanted to buy.  The local poets thought otherwise. They saw it as the opening salvo of the coming kulturkämpf, a kind of Manichean battle between the forces of culture vs. the forces of Mammon. (I guess I was Mammon.) It was argued that Fred Cody would have never eliminated the small press table. Whenever I did something at the store that some group didn’t like, I always accused of betraying the memory of Fred Cody.

I countered with my own broadside. I brought up   the words of T. S. Eliot to  attempt to shame the poets for using language like a sledge-hammer. I reminded them that “between the motion and the act, between the idea and the reality, falls the shadow.”  This tempest in a teapot finally resolved itself in a meeting over some cappuccinos across the street at the Café Med. I’m not sure how it all sorted out, but I think there was some kind of compromise where I promised some displays in other areas.

The biggest book for us that year and one of the biggest books ever at the store was Cosmos by Carl Sagan. Sagan had hosted an incredibly successful PBS series on astronomy.  He was also easy to parody. People went around all year imitating him by blowing up their cheeks and then exhaling histrionically while saying : “BILLIONS of stars”. We knew that this spinoff was going to be a very big book.

I decided to take a few cues from the chains and make a huge pile of  Cosmos right at the front entrance. The chains loved these mountainous displays of a single title that seemed to mesmerize  customers as they  entered the stores. They called the merchandising principle: “pile ’em high and watch  ’em fly.”  The  Cody’s staff was  generally appalled by  the Cosmos  display and started bludgeoning me with Fred Cody again. (Fred saw the display and didn’t seem particularly concerned.)   Maybe the staff was right  though. The first day the display was up, a customer came in with his dog who promptly lifted up his leg and peed on the stack. When I tried to get the customer, a disabled man and a Cody’s regular, to tie the dog up outside, he cited chapter and verse of the legal code that gave disabled people the right to be accompanied by their dog. I lost the battle but won the war. We sold over 1000 copies of  Cosmos.

How I Came to Own Cody’s Part 1

Pat and Fred Cody and Me 1977

One day in May, 1977 I drove down to Santa Cruz to visit my friend, Neal Coonerty, who owned  the remarkable, Bookshop Santa Cruz. It was a big store for its time, about 10,000 square feet. It was in a lovely brick building on the pedestrian mall downtown. It had a little cobblestone terrace in back where there was a flower stand and a cappuccino counter.   The store was  a kind of bigger version  of Eeyore’s. Well, except that it had a water bed in the middle of the store. I met Neal at a booksellers school that year. We cut up a lot and made fun of the stuffy teachers. He’s still my best friend in bookselling, and his family still owns Bookshop Santa Cruz. The water bed is gone, though.

I was crashing on Neal’s living room couch that night. Just before going to bed, Neal asked me if I was aware that Cody’s in Berkeley was for sale.  I told him that I had heard the rumor. Cody’s was, even then, a famous store, legendary really. I knew about it even  when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University in Boston. Neal said, “why don’t you buy it?” That seemed unimaginable to me. I was only thirty, and in my mind I felt like I was still 20. When he told me what the asking price was (it was $150,000), I realized I could probably scrape up the money to buy it. It was hard to think of myself as  the owner of Cody’s.  Cody’s was a national icon and an enormously important force in bookselling. Things were smaller then. Owning Cody’s at that time was, to the book business,  a little like  owning Facebook today.

I woke up the next morning and walked out to my car accompanied by Neal. He asked, “So are you going to buy Cody’s?”  I shook my head  and drove away. I thought about it again while driving home. It was a big decision and one that would change the course of my entire adult life. So I tried to give it more thought than  the capricious decision that  I  made to quit graduate school.  So I must have thought about it for at least an hour. As soon as I got back to my house, I called up  Pat and Fred Cody and asked if we could meet. What happened next is a pretty short story. They liked me. I liked them. A month later on July 9, 1977  I was the new owner of Cody’s.

That date, July 9, had a certain inexorable destiny in the history of Cody’s. It was the date that the store was founded in 1956, and the date that I bought the store 21 years later. It was the date that Fred Cody died in 1983. We also originally planned on closing the Telegraph store forever on that date in 2006. When we realized that would be the 50^th anniversary of the store’s founding, we made the decent decision to postpone the closing till the following day.

The Codys were larger than life. Fred Cody was one of the most charismatic men I ever knew. He was about 6’2″, had wavy grey hair and looked a little like Moses without the beard. He was a true intellectual. He also got into the business because he had a  passion for books. He had an advanced degree in history, just like me. And he also was just the sweetest guy you could ever imagine. I loved him. Everybody loved him. Pat Cody was great and had a passion for books too. But she brought to Cody’s complementary strengths. Where Fred was a dreamer, Pat was practical and a hardnosed business person.

Everybody thinks of Berkeley as the most radical city in America. It certainly isn’t any more, but probably was back then.  But  just like every other community, Berkeley people were resistant to   change  and wary of outsiders. And they were particularly concerned about the unknown  30 year old who was taking over their beloved bookstore. I learned that one local bookseller, after meeting me, commented disparagingly  that he hoped I had good help.  Everybody came up to me and admonished me not to change anything at Cody’s. I promised I wouldn’t. The Codys knew better. They told me that the store needed new blood and a lot change. And they were confident that I could do it.

During the month of negotiations I had with them, they wouldn’t let me come into the store and meet the staff. Finally the day before the store was to change hands, I was allowed to come in. Pat and Fred stayed around for a few days to clean up their office. Then Fred came up to me and said, “I’m going home. Call me if you need anything.” I was too young and inexperienced to realize that I was too young and inexperienced. So I just started working.   For the next 30 years anybody who disagreed with me for any reason would tell me that Fred Cody would have done things differently. They usually said that they were “close personal friends with Bill Cody”. This was always a tipoff that they that they had no idea what they were talking about.   Some of those people hadn’t even been born when Fred owned the store.  People called me “the new owner of Cody’s” for about 20 years.

 When I bought Cody’s in 1977, it was considered a “paperback bookstore.”  That was when paperback books were beginning to come out of the closet. “Trade” paperbacks weren’t all that common in bookstores  until the 1950s. Bookstores mostly catered to the carriage trade and thought that paperbacks were for riff-raff and beneath their dignity. But bookstores started cropping up that had more egalitarian sensibilities and  started specializing  in the new format. The conventional wisdom is that the first 3 stores that blazed the way for the paperback revolution were in the San Francisco Bay Area. They were Kepler’s in Palo Alto, City Lights in San Francisco, and Cody’s in Berkeley, all started in the mid 1950s; and  all catering to a clientele that was long on brains and short on cash. Each of the founders were intellectual dissenters of a sort. Roy Kepler  was a pacifist and peace activist. Fred Cody had a Ph.D but couldn’t get a job in academics because he refused to take a loyalty oath.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who started City Lights, was a prominent poet and deeply involved in the Beat culture of San Francisco.

National Guard Outside Cody's -1969

In the 1960s all of these stores became central players in the political unrest of the times. Fred was an early supporter of the Free Speech Movement  that galvanized radical dissent at UC in 1964.  Later Fred was an outspoken peace activist. And Cody’s became an intellectual center for left wing politics, a tradition that continued after  I took over the store. FSM leader, Mario Savio, briefly worked at Cody’s.  In the sixties, there was a lot of turbulence going on right outside the doors of the store associated with the Viet Nam War. In 1969 Governor Ronald Reagan responded to the civil unrest in Berkeley by sending in the National Guard. In justifying this exercise of  excessive force, he famously said, “If the bloodbath must come, then let’s get on with it.” 

Reagan was no Abraham Lincoln, and Telegraph Avenue was no Fort Sumter. But peace activists kept marching up and down Telegraph Avenue,  and the cops were tossing tear gas canisters around to  disperse the crowds. Cody’s would always open the doors to let in the  activists fleeing  from the cops. Fred and Pat  Cody loved to tell the story of  the time that the police threw a tear gas  grenade into the store. The employees  tossed  it back out the door. The cops tossed it in again  and then it  blew up releasing the tear gas throughout the store.  Not good.  Months later you could open some of the books and out wafted  a little of the residual gas.

There is a wonderful documentary  film about the history of Cody’s and Kepler’s . It tells the story of the stores during the sixties emphasizing how they mirrored the political activism of the times   and juxtaposes that story against the struggles that the two stores  went through during the last 10 years as we addressed the challenges we faced with the growth of corporate and Internet bookselling.  The filmmaker, Alex Beckstead, came to me  in 2005 and asked if he could follow me around in order to make this film. I said it was ok. He had hoped to make an uplifting film about how these two famous bookstores triumphed over the  mass merchants. It didn’t turn out that way at all. He ended up with a poignant documentary of Cody’s collapse.  It is called Paperback Dreams. I hate watching that movie. In my mind, it is a narrative of all the mistakes that I made during the last years of the store.  Leslie, my wife,  suffered through it as well; and says I am being too hard on myself.  And  others see it differently as well, more like a classic tragedy, a  struggle against an inexorable fate.  It has been shown on PBS in most of the major markets. The DVD is available online and at bookstores.