Textbooks from the terminal. (on-demand custom printing of college textbooks)

Back in April, when Xerox Corporation rolled out its grand plan for digital delivery for printing of books at multiple remote sites, Paul Allaire, chairman and CEO spoke of a "Document Superhighway," a revolutionary way to get information from publishers to readers that would change the way people think of books and booksellers.

Announced at the conference of the Association for Information and Image Management in New York City, Xerox's systematic approach, which it referred to as its "initiative," included hardware, software and conceptual innovations aimed at digitizing the entire publishing operation, so that information can be captured, edited, structured, sent, stored, retrieved and printed, all at remote sites. According to Xerox Document Production Systems president Colin O'Brien, the heart of the initiative is a software package called the Document Services Platform (DocuSP), which is supposed to guarantee that desktop computers, scanners, storage devices and printers can exchange information no matter who manufactured the devices or where they are located. There is also a "document management application" called Xerox Documents on Demand for editing and assembling books, and software for tracking use and copyright of materials printed.

The new DocuSP framework will open up the Xerox DocuTech laser printing system to a wide range of information sources, including networks such as Ethernet and Netware, hardware platforms such as DOS Windows and Macintosh, and page description languages like Adobe Post-Script.

The idea behind the Xerox initiative was to strike at the waste and inefficiencies in publishing caused by the currrent method of editing, printing, storing and distributing books. Warehousing and shipping, particularly, cause expenses that can be eliminated by distributing the printing of certain classes of books to the place where they will be used. One of the target markets Xerox named was textbooks.

Xerox's plan sounded like the perfect answer to a tough problem. The comprehensive, systematic approach to publishing industry conundrums; the high-speed, highquality Xerox scanners and printers; the "open architecture" allowing other manufacturers' …