Knowledge as you like it

Print-on-demand technologies are changing the way students and lecturers access information worldwide. Jon Marcus, left, explains how a landmark US court case prompted publishers to rethink their sales models.

At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, assembling a custom textbook tailored to a class is like ordering a meal from a menu.

A professor chooses chapters from existing works in any order, adding journal articles, unpublished case studies, even magazine excerpts. A few days later - instant textbook.

"It's free form," says Daniel Archer, USC's senior manager for course materials. "Professors make exactly what they want for their course. It isn't obsolete the day it's printed. And the students don't spend all their money buying textbooks that they'll hardly even open."

Custom publishing represents only about $10 million a year of the $2.1 billion college textbook market in the United States, but it is growing exponentially. Scanning technology has made it easier for universities to enter written information into electronic databases, where, while new software forwards royalties directly to the publisher.

"I won't say it is by any means easy dealing with all the different publishers and getting agreement on all those copyright issues, but many of those barriers are coming down," says Bill Schweinfurth, business manager for customised products at Eastman-Kodak, which makes storage, scanning and printing equipment for colleges and universities.

The Kodak system automatically creates a table of contents and keeps track of copyright payments. Xerox sells similar technology. "The future as I see it is you'll see much more custom publications, possibly each one identified with a student's name on it and designed just for that one student," Mr Schweinfurth says.

Industry officials say the print-on-demand market will grow to $500 million by the end of the decade. At Stanford, annual sales of custom textbooks in the campus store have grown from $250,000 to $1.6 million since 1992. At USC they have quadrupled to $800,000 in just two years.

In addition to these and about 70 other of the nation's biggest universities, publishers are entering the market. McGraw Hill, which pioneered the process, has been joined by HarperCollins, American Heritage and Prentice-Hall. "It started slowly, but then higher education is a fairly traditional market," says Jim Lichtenberg, vice president for higher education at the Association of American Publishers. "Now there's no major publisher that isn't either doing it or getting ready to do it. Custom publishing will be the nature of publishing."

US publishers won a landmark copyright infringement suit in 1991 against a national copy centre chain that duplicated material from books and journals without permission and sold anthologies to students. The incident persuaded them there was a huge demand for customised material. "It was out there already. We just needed to get the professors and the students to do it ethically and legally," says Mr Archer, who is also a member of the course materials committee of the National Association of College Stores.

The Primis print-on-demand system created five years ago by McGraw Hill has more than 150,000 pages of material available for customised texts, including 10,900 books, articles, manuscripts, case studies, lab manuals, chemistry experiments and other documents in 20 academic disciplines; the sociology database alone is used at more than 300 schools.

"It's not a question of taking business away from the textbook division," says Eileen Ohea, spokeswoman for Primis. "It's more an issue of having a market out there that hadn't been developed yet."

Professors choose material from printed and electronic catalogues and get a sample copy in less than a week for a lecture course of 600 or a tutorial of one.

"A traditional textbook could be in production for a year before it goes out," says Ms Ohea. "But because the Primis material is loaded electronically, it takes five days. We just loaded articles from this week's Business Week for an accounting course."

Publishers initially restricted custom texts to materials for which they owned the copyright. Now most of them also offer selections from the inventories of their industry rivals. "They recognise that many of the things professors want to use come out of more than one publisher," Mr Schweinfurth says.