Personal Book (http://www.personalbook.cl) is a new print on demand web site recently launched in Chile. What is print on demand? Most books are traditionally published in editions. Editions can range from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of books. This is because publishers use traditional tools for printing which are not cost effective for small quanities of books. This generates several problems for publishers since many times they don't know how good a book will sell. Books which have little circulation can become permanently out of print when there is little demand. This problems are also faced by bookstores since they must keep stock and are faced with the same uncertainty.

With the advent of digital technology it is now cost effective to print books 'on demand'. Personal Book is Chile's first on demand book store. They have absolutely no stock. Users can search and order books using the site. The books can be personalized with text and are printed with digital technology.

Users can search the site to find books that might be out of print or have little circulation.

When an order is placed a complex process is triggered. The software determines the best imposition to use to minimize printing costs and the original book is rendered and sent to high speed printers. The book covers are also printed using digital printing technology. Once the book, cover and personalization are printed the application tracks the production and delivery to reduce errors and thus minimize costs.

The site and software was entirely developed by Easytech. Our partner ABZ comunicacion provided the stylish graphic design for the site. The system is quite complex and includes an order tracking system to follow orders though the production cycle, an administration interface for system configuration and reporting, CMS software, a secure storage architecture to store the books contents and an imposition engine to generate high quality PDF files for printing.

Users enter the personalization text and can change the typeface, size and text alignment.

A preview of how the personalition text will look like is provided so that users can see exactly how the personalization will be rendered.

Technologies: Drupal, Linux, PHP, Java, JSM, Oracle Database.