Moving HP’s Print 2.0 Vision Forward

We’ve discussed HP’s Print 2.0 vision on the InfoBlog in the past, and two recent announcements signify that the company continues to forge new partnerships that enable print in interesting ways. These announcements include a partnership between HP’s MagCloud service and online wiki community site Wikia, as well as HP’s partnership with University of Michigan on BookPrep, a platform for printing rare, out-of-print books.

MagCloud/Wikia Partnership

MagCloud is one of HP’s services we’ve talked about in the past that continues to evolve and gain wider exposure. The service provides a platform for virtually anyone to publish their own magazines to the Web, and gives users the option to have one or many copies printed and shipped to them. These magazines are printed on HP Indigo devices, although it’s not quite clear (at least to me) if HP is printing items in-house or funneling them to print service provider partners.

In any case, HP recently announced a partnership between MagCloud and Wikia, an online service available for people to create wikis on any topic, similar to how Ning can be used to create social networks on any topic. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales, creator of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, and currently has wiki databases on a wide variety of topics. Some of the largest Wikia communities include a wiki on music lyrics, a recipe wiki with over 40,000 entries, and a genealogy wiki called Familypedia. The MagCloud/Wikia partnership is largely in the form of technology, with the two groups collaborating on building a Magazine Creator tool within Wikia. The Magazine Creator allows users to collect articles within a Wikia community that they want to publish, design a cover based on templates or with uploaded images, and publish the magazine through MagCloud. MagCloud handles the formatting of wiki pages into print-appropriate layouts, and published works can be ordered through the MagCloud site. An appropriate and funny example used to demonstrate this technology comes from MuppetWiki, which created a 32-page magazine filled about Muppets character Grover and the different types of jobs he’s had.

While the MagCloud/Wikia partnership is a very interesting concept and a great way to leverage communities to support print, it raises a number of issues. First and foremost, there are a number of copyright issues to consider. While the text content on Wikia (and Wikipedia) falls under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, much of the graphical content on Wikia, such as images and logos, is copyrighted material displayed under Fair Use. By forming this partnership with MagCloud, Wikia opens up the majority of its articles to publication (copyrighted or not), and it’s questionable whether HP and MagCloud are just covering the costs of printing and shipping with their pricing, or if there are margins included to generate some sort of profit. Additionally, MagCloud’s own terms of use restrict copyright infringement within publications under part g of the “User Publication and User Feedback representations and warranties” section:

your User Publications and User Feedback do not infringe the copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, or other intellectual property rights, privacy rights, publicity rights or any other legal or moral rights of any third-party;

Additionally, automating the layout process from wiki page to magazine page still seems a bit cumbersome, which may turn some people off. It’s a challenge that HP has expertise at trying to solve, however, as shown over the past few years with its acquisition of Tabblo, the creation of HP Smart Web Printing, and its Tabblo spin-off called Tabbloid. It will be interesting to see how this collaboration moves forward, especially when dealing with some of these aforementioned issues.

HP BookPrep

Another interesting piece of news from HP is its beta launch of BookPrep, the cloud computing service for preparing high-quality, raw scans of old, potentially out-of-print books. In addition to aligning with HP’s Print 2.0 initiative, BookPrep (and MagCloud) is part of a larger effort by HP to offer a wide variety of cloud-based solutions, dubbed by HP as “Everything as a Service“, or EaaS. Everything as a Service was discussed by HP’s VP and CTO of cloud services strategies, Russ Daniels, at GigaOm’s Structure ‘09 conference back in June.

To get BookPrep off the ground and feature content, HP partnered with the University of Michigan, which has one of the top-ranked research libraries in the US and a collection of over 7 million printed books. This partnership adds to an existing partnership between HP and Applewood Books, a publisher of historical books related to America’s past. By forming these partnerships, BookPrep now has a library of almost 500,000 books that can be viewed for free and printed/shipped for a nominal fee. HP is actively soliciting other publishers to participate, as well.

The main function of BookPrep is described by its name: publishers upload raw scans of book pages and BookPrep detects content on a page, crops it, de-skews it, color corrects it, and removes defects from it. A great example of what processed pages look like compared to the originals can be found here.

There are a few intriguing points about this service. If you search through BookPrep’s library of newly-added University of Michigan-based books, you will find that many of these books are in draft form, meaning that a lower-quality version is available online, but the higher-quality, print-ready version has not been processed. Therefore, a user cannot buy the book directly, but can enter an e-mail address to pre-order it. By pre-ordering the book, it seems that the book will bumped up in queue for processing, so-to-speak. This is an interesting approach, which wasn’t 100% clear in the press release. It seems that the strategy with BookPrep is to only prepare books for print that have been pre-ordered, reserving resources for books that are in demand. There are a number of examples of books, especially from Applewood, that have already been fully-processed and have unique covers available. As the collection grows, however, it makes sense to prioritize processing resources to those books that have an ordering demand.

The BookPrep Website states that they have “an ever-expanding network of Print Service Providers and agreements with several online distribution channels to sell the content.” According to the press release, BookPrep has a partnership with Amazon.com as a platform for selling the books to a wider audience. When I attempted to place an order of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin from BookPrep (released by Applewood Books), it linked to an order form from Lightning Source. It seems like Applewood, not HP, is utilizing Lightning Source as a POD provider, and it will be interesting to see what other providers HP will utilize as its library continues to expand. It will also be interesting to see how the HP/Amazon partnership takes shape, especially because of Amazon’s preference of having publishers utilize its own BookSurge service to post on-demand books for sale. Will HP be forced to use BookSurge to enable this partnership, or will Amazon open up its options?

Additionally, the BookPrep announcement introduces a competitor to the recently-announced partnership between Google Book Search and On Demand Books, makers of the Espresso Book Machine. Instead of printing on-site, BookPrep has a Web-only ordering method. While Google Books has 2 million books to choose from, BookPrep only has a little less than 500,000 right now, and there is surely some overlap in those books available. On the contrary, there are no “in-copyright” books available through BookPrep to my knowledge, meaning that there are not any looming copyright issues, such as the ones that have plagued Google Book Search, including its recent settlement and opposition against it by authors, publishers, and other tech companies. Additionally, Espresso Book Machines are only available in a limited number of locations, although they have been a success at some bookstores. It also seems like the BookPrep service does a  better job cleaning up book scans for print (especially color pictures and illustrations), but it’s not clear if the text is OCR’d and will eventually become searchable like with Google Book Search.

Will an online-only model that BookPrep is adopting be successful versus a hybrid physical/virtual presence that Google Book Search is trying to build? Regardless of this question, it’s clear that HP sees printing and publishing as core to its product and service offerings, and it continues to use innovative technologies to enable print in new and intriguing applications.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.