Press Release

Book-On-Demand Pioneers Print First Fully Automated Order of One

July 9, 2001 -- History was made late Saturday night, when two Midwest engineers, using remote control over the Internet, commanded the first book to emerge from a book vending machine with absolutely no operator intervention. While book pundits were either fast asleep or out on the town sipping cocktails, Jeff Marsh of Marsh Technologies, Inc. (MTI), in St. Louis, and Peter Zelchenko of Chicago-based VolumeOne, were hard at work. "What else do guys like us do for fun on a Saturday night?" joked Marsh.

At 11:26 p.m. Central Time, a single copy of Robin Shamburg's novel, Mistress Ruby Ties It Together, slid out of a chute on the MTI PerfectBook-080 in Chesterfield, Mo. Motors could be heard whirring in the background, making their final travel back into their home positions after releasing the finished book. "The book is out," were the words from Marsh. The Shamburg book had been selected and ordered at VolumeOne's prototype customer Web site 12 minutes earlier. Zelchenko was 300 miles north in Chicago, monitoring the job's progress on the VolumeOne Book Dispatcher.

Shamburg's book explores the bizarre world of sadomasochism, which may seem an anticlimactic choice, pun unintended, for such a momentous event. Perhaps a copy of the Bible or of Jason Epstein's Book Business would have been more consonant with the occasion. "That's what Random House gave me," said Marsh. The New York-based publisher had provided several titles to Marsh to test on his platform. "But maybe it's appropriate," he grinned. "After all, we've been on our knees and chained to our machines for the past several weeks."

The novelty lies in the merger of two converging technologies -- the world's first commercially viable instant book manufacturing device, united with the first fully automated Internet-based traffic management system specifically tailored for books on demand. Though the two companies have been associated for some years, they decided to merge the most mature of their developments in anticipation of an upcoming demonstration to Barnes & Noble. "Technically," said VolumeOne's Zelchenko, "someone in China could have punched in a credit card number and, from a list of sites, selected Jeff's facility to produce the book. A few moments later, the book would have begun printing and binding down in Chesterfield behind Jeff's back."

On a commercial scale -- perhaps in the near future, as some observers are predicting -- these transactions will take place tens of thousands of times every hour, and books will shoot themselves to thousands of facilities all over the world. Books will be stored in secure locations on publishers' Internet sites and will travel to automated or manually operated book printing devices located near the customer. In June, Marsh, as president of Marsh Technologies, selected printing equipment giant Moore North America to handle manufacturing of the PerfectBook.

Marsh Technologies, established in 1984, began developing the PerfectBook line in the mid-1990s as the reduction to practice of a book machine patent, issued to Harvey Ross. Ross, also an engineer and also hailing from St. Louis, conceived of these devices in the late 1980s, several years before printing equipment would reach the technical and economic maturity to tackle the job of printing books. This year, two of the most crucial claims in Ross's much-discussed patent were officially upheld by the Patent and Trademark Office.

Marsh's primary development effort is the MTI PerfectBook line, including the PerfectBook-040, a single-printer automated book device, and the PerfectBook-080, a dual-printer offering. These systems can print a book's pages on a laser printer, print its cover on a color printer, glue-bind the two parts, and trim them automatically to a precise finish size, without the help of human hands. In addition, MTI provides several standalone systems that can do particular portions of this work.

VolumeOne's systems are based on two key principles. The first is that the software be tailored specifically to producing the product at hand -- in this case, books on demand -- automating at every possible opportunity. The nearest software from other vendors acts as a "Swiss Army Knife, and misses the most basic points about on-demand, unit-run book transmittal," Zelchenko said. Furthermore, no system automates the process to the extent that VolumeOne's does. The second principle is that the software support a variety of platforms. Currently, the VolumeOne Book Dispatcher has been tested with Hewlett-Packard equipment, T/R Systems cluster printing environments, and now Marsh Technologies' fully automated PerfectBook systems, which Zelchenko considers the greatest accomplishment of all.

In 1997, Zelchenko founded VolumeOne and developed a patent which picks up where the Ross patent ends, addressing the network needs of book-on-demand printing. In 1998, Ross's patent attorneys agreed to take on the Zelchenko patent and work on the two as a pair. That same year, Zelchenko and his partners ordered the first book to be printed by remote control over the Internet, and bound it by hand. The demonstration with Ross makes the work a completely hands-off affair for the first time.

"There are a few kinks to work out," admitted Marsh about the latest developments. "But the main effort is complete, and we have proven that it is not only technically feasible, but also economically so."

"A major point of this technology," according to John Stempeck, CEO of VolumeOne and former vice president of Xerox, "is to help solve certain crippling problems in the book industry." Among these is the now-famous returns problem, which has seen record numbers in the latest reports. Bookstores take units on consignment and have the privilege of returning a book to the publisher for a full refund if it fails to sell. In a book market which sees such high title turnover, this practice is preventing the publisher and the author from realizing much better financials, and is costing the book distribution system time and money. Other applications include pre-publication books, low-volume title preservation, out-of-print book revival, in-house publication printing, technical manual production, and educational publishing.

Marsh and Zelchenko have, between them, a combined total of 67 years' experience in engineering, computing, and publishing. Marsh began work in 1959 and spent the better part of his career engineering major powertrain systems systems for several automobile manufacturers, and was on the team at Kelsey-Hayes in Michigan designing the original anti-lock braking systems. Zelchenko got his start with mainframes and microcomputing in the 1970s, and got his first paid work when he was 13 years old. He is also an accomplished Chicago-area commercial designer and publishing expert, and has designed several books, including Adobe's most popular e-book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

While at Xerox, John Stempeck conceived and directed the Book In Time(TM) project, which linked Xerox Docutech systems together in a large international book-on-demand printing network.

It is appropriate that the Midwest be the setting for these developments in printing engineering, since it has been the major center for printing, printing equipment manufacturing, and printing standards development in the United States since the late 1800s. Since that time, many if not most printing technology has grown up in the area, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, Kansas, Indiana, Michigan, and Minnesota.

Marsh Technologies, Inc.
Jeff Marsh
761 Spirit of St. Louis Blvd.
Chesterfield, MO 63005
(636) 530-0100
jmarsh@marshtechinc.com
http://www.marshtechinc.com

VolumeOne
John Stempeck
1757 W. Augusta Blvd.
Chicago, IL 60622
(781) 942-9253
stempeck@mediaone.net
http://www.volumeone.net

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