Project Lead: Nancy Deschenes

The American Booksellers' Association wanted to cut the costs of printing and distributing their newsletter, Bookselling This Week, as well as bring articles to the bookstores faster. They thought of moving the newsletter to online distribution, but did not want to reduce the quality of the service offered to stores who preferred a hard copy of the newsletter.

How could they reduce their printing costs and still offer a hard copy of the newsletter? Was it possible, without having to create two versions -- one for the web and one for print?

They asked OCI for help, and OCI developed a "print on demand" system that generates a professional looking, two-column newsletter in PDF format, from the current on-line Bookselling This Week articles. Stores could then print the newsletter themselves, and still enjoy the high quality layout and presentation they had become used to. OCI even improved the process by allowing each store to print either the whole newsletter, or only selected articles relevant to their particular needs and interest.

Problem

High printing cost

The American Booksellers' Association (ABA) publishes a weekly newsletter, Bookselling This Week, of interest to its members. They wanted to make the delivery of the newsletter content more effective and efficient. Booksellers should get the newsletter articles as soon as possible, and the ABA wanted to reduce the cost of printing and delivering it. They were already publishing some articles on the web (using a content management tool developed by OCI in 1996), so it was a logical conclusion that they should publish all of the articles on the website. This would allow faster content delivery, and booksellers could easily focus on the articles that interested them, without having to go through the whole newsletter.

Need for professional looking layouts

Some members prefer reading a hard copy of the Booksellig This Week newsletter, for various reason. The ABA did not want to leave these booksellers behind, but it would be time consuming if they had to publish both an on-line and a hard copy version. Booksellers could be told to print the articles off the website, but they would lose professional looking layouts they used to get on the print version of the newsletter. Given the way web browsers usually handle printing, they would also very likely end up using much more paper than actually needed.

Solution

In order to reduce printing and distribution cost, the first step is let the members print the newsletter themselves, if they want to. For many members, reading the Bookselling This Week articles online is enough, so only those that really prefer the print version will print it. Since the members will print the newsletter themselves, there will be no hardcopy distribution costs.

Choosing a file format: PDF

OCI considered a number of formats that could be used to distribute a "printable version" of the newsletter, and settled on PDF. Adobe's Portable Document Format, is cross-platform, but is always rendered the same, regardless of the operating system or reader software used. PDF is a common file format, and users can be expected to already have a reader such as Adobe's Acrobat Reader, or to be able and willing to install one. PDF readers are installed on more personal computers than PostScript, and usually, the PDF version of a documentis smaller than the PostScript version, so the file transfer is faster.

Using an intermediate step, XSL

Generating PDF files on the fly can be difficult, even when using some of the libraries available. OCI decided to introduce an intermediate step, and first generate a xml:fo file, then process that file into PDF. The file format xml:fo is a part of the XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) standard that describes the document and its layout, without having to calculate exactly how much of the document fits on each individual page.

The process then uses FOP (Formatting Object Processor), an open source processor that turns the xml:fo into PDF. Since FOP and PDF are standard, FOP was not the only such tool that could be used, but it gave the best quality for the costs. Since it is open source, OCI was able to correct some bugs that occured when using two-column layouts. If a better formatting object processor becomes available, it can be used instead of FOP easily, because of the modular way in which the code was written.

Site Manager integration

The American Booksellers' Association has been using Site Manager for their BookWeb website since 1996, so when they decided to put Bookselling This Week online, they continued to use the tool they were familiar with. The "print on demand" project was developed to tie in seamlessly with Site Manager. An interface layer was developed that pulls the articles from the Site Manager database, groups them, pre-processes them, and passes them on to the perl module that generates the print version of the newsletter. The perl module generates a table of contents, translates the HTML in the articles to xml:fo, sets up the header and footer for the newsletter, and calls FOP to generate the PDF.

Booksellers React:
"...Kudos on the new options. I particularly like the ability to choose articles and create my own version of BTW."

Terry Whittaker
Viewpoint Bookstore

OCI thought it would be possible to offer the bookstores even more value by letting them choose which articles they wanted to include in the newsletter. Since not all stores have the same needs, some may not find that they benefit from the whole newsletter issue, and prefer to focus only on those articles relevant to their situation. So, OCI also developed an "article selection" page which lists all the articles available in the current issue. Stores select the articles they want, submit their request, and get their customized version of the Bookselling This Week newsletter.

Results

See this module at work on the Bookselling This Week website.

The project was completed in less than one month, and for less than two months worth of cost of printing and distributing the print version of the newsletter. The American Booksellers' Association no longer has any costs associated with printing and distributing the hardcopy newsletter.

Customizable list of articles

Because of the way the "print on demand" project was implemented, each bookstore can get a customized version of the newsletter, at no extra cost for the bookstore or for the American Booksellers' Association. Stores can also retreive past versions of the newsletter (archives) which can also be customized.

Customizable layout: large print

Our Client Reacts:
"As far as I know, this is a fairly unparalleled offering in the realm of online publishing, both its range of choice and its ease of use. I'm especially grateful to the work of Objective Consulting, which designed such a bookstore-appropriate solution."

Dan Cullen
Director of Information,
American Booksellers Association

After the "print on demand" project had been running for a while, some bookstores asked if it would be possible to get a version of the newsletter with a slightly larger print. OCI offered a few samples of font and layout combinations, and the American Bookseller's Association settled on one. This new layout is now available to bookstores as a "Large print" version. This option is included on the article selection page, so that bookstores who want the large-print version still enjoy the opportunity of selecting the articles they want.

News Stories Involving This Project

April 25, 2002 -- Print on Demand Project Launches

The Print on Demand tool allows users to choose which articles are printed.

Articles are put into a two column newsletter format for printing

Tools and Technologies

All the technologies used for this project are completely cross platform. They can be run on Unix (FreeBSD in this case), Windows, or MacOS X.

• XML
• XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language)
• FOP (Formatting Objects Processor)
• XML:FO
• Apache
• Java 2 Standard Edition
• Perl
• CGI
• Site Manager