[2690] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: "Electropress", digital printing press used by McGraw-Hill / Primis
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bob Weber)
Sun Apr 19 19:22:18 1992
Date: Sun, 19 Apr 92 19:20:18 -0400
From: weber@world.std.com (Bob Weber)
To: emv@msen.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
> Edward Vielmetti <emv@msen.com> writes:
>
>If the quality of the binding of these "Electrobooks" is up to the snuff of
>the first issues from the press, organizations like Kinko's will have a
>hard time keeping up; where your traditional stack of photocopies is
>worthless after a single semester's use, a nicely bound custom text
>is going to be a lot more attractive.
While I have not seen this new technology, it is premature to count
Kinkos, alphagraphics, college stores, and university computer centers
out of the action. Today, Xerox DocuTech(tm) intergrated scanner,
printer, and binder and Kodak Lionheart(tm) printers
are viable alternatives for so-called custom publishing. The key
problems today are not printing and binding, but rather the fact
that most publishers don't have there materials in a form that can
be distributed electronically. McGraw-Hill has put substantial effort
in to getting their books into word-processing/page layout software
that produces PostScript(tm) output. Most publishers have yet to
follow their lead.
As custom
publishing evolves into what I call Distributed Digital Printing,
network services providers will play an important role in connecting
publishers, permissions services, local printing operations, and
customers. Network transport is not a problem; rather, there are
no agreed upon standards (and software) that present print jobs to
DocuTech and similar printers, handle the copyright and financial
transactions, and distribute the information to be printed over
local and wide area networks. The Cupid consortium lead by
Stu Lynn (Cornell) and Steve Hall (Harvard) is addressing part of
these problems, but the general, open solution is not yet in sight.
Bob Weber
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