Later this year, the Ann Arbor, Mich., printer Malloy and the Charleston, S.C., print-on-demand company BookSurge will test a project that offers print-on-demand capability and global distribution to Malloy's customers. "Our objective is to be able to seamlessly provide ultra-short-run and true print-on-demand services to our customers," said Bill Upton, Malloy's president and CEO.
The project involves Malloy reconfiguring customers' title files so they are POD-ready for BookSurge. Titles are listed through BookSurge's distribution partners—which include R.R. Bowker's Books in Print, Amazon.com, Google, Baker & Taylor, Alibris, Centraal Boekhuis in the Netherlands, and Whitaker TeleOrdering in the U.K. When a copy of a book is ordered, the title is sent electronically to the closest printing facility, where the book is printed and mailed. In the U.S., for example, books are printed at BookSurge's facility in Charleston; in the Netherlands the facility is in the Dutch Library Association, near Centraal Boekhuis. BookSurge guarantees printing and shipment of orders in two business days. Books are nonreturnable.
Malloy expects that the beta test will last for a few months before it is rolled out to all Malloy customers. "This will be a big opportunity for publishers to have their files in the system, so people across the world can order the content," said Upton. "We see that the way publishers are doing business is changing, and we want to be able to handle it."
BookSurge's agreement with Malloy is just the latest development in the transformation of the company that started in 1999 as an e-publisher offering services to self-published authors under the name GreatUnpublished. It built a digital conversion/POD service and an online bookstore as an adjunct to that service. Now, according to Mitchell Davis, senior v-p for business development, the business has morphed, and BookSurge offers publisher services to institutions, publishers and self-published authors. He said, "When we started out, we wanted to manufacture and ship after we got the check. So we started our own facility to do print-on-demand for other publishers, then expanded our distribution channels." BookSurge now has 10,000 titles in its system.
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