The company hopes to build demand by pitching them as cost-saving "print on demand" machines that work best when connected to HP computing hardware.

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They also point out that new technologies such as print on demand, which makes printing short runs of physical books more economical, should help them squeeze more money out of the old-fashioned format.

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Ebook sales, print-on-demand paperbacks, audiobooks, merchandise every author should be doing at least these things.

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Mayersohn declined to discuss specific sales figures, but he did say that the margins on self-published books are very good (do I detect shades of Amazon here?), even better than those of the print-on-demand traditional books.

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Book Business is nearly a decade old and at the time one of the emerging technologies in the industry was the Espresso Machine, which, despite its misleading name, does not make coffee but prints books a print-on-demand machine for bookshops.

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