McNally Jackson Books

Goals and Requirements

With the rise of big-box bookstores, independent booksellers have had to innovate in order to remain a vibrant and relevant business in the publishing world. In this case, independent bookseller Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books partnered with a handful of other booksellers, the American Booksellers Association and On Demand Books to create a cutting-edge and novel approach that is revolutionizing the way booksellers do business.

McNally Jackson provides its customers access to the Espresso Book Machine, which has been called “an ATM for books” by Time Magazine, and was named one of the best inventions of 2007. This technology has dramatic potential for point-of-sale purchases, and even more so for the online and out-of-print market, especially as more book publishers are releasing their catalogs digitally. This publishing model can reduce the amount of inventory that a bookseller needs to keep in stock, as well as make books available that have been out of print for years. It also facilitates self-publishing, which is becoming ever more popular as better self-publishing tools become available. The Espresso Book Machine is truly a part of the "internet of things” and is a smart physical object that gathers and processes data to fulfill each user's specific needs.

The American Booksellers Association has a large Drupal multisite platform that houses hundreds of websites for its members’ bookstores, one of which is McNally Jackson Books. Our overarching goal was to help make the Espresso Book Machine as easy as possible to use by seamlessly integrating it into McNally Jackson's website without adding complexity to other websites hosted on the same platform. Our first goal in this project was to build a way for customers visiting these participating member websites to search for digital books. We created a custom integration module that would allow Drupal to search through an often-changing list of multiple vendors, like Google Books, the Internet Archive and a number of commercial publishers.

Our second goal had to do with the hardware integration: we needed to build a solution to allow the customer to purchase a book from the website in an intuitive way, and then send the order to the bookstore for printing and either pickup or shipping.

On Demand Books was negotiating with an ever-growing list of digital sources, so the source search had to provide shoppers real-time access to a list of searchable sources. Once the source search was completed and a list of results displayed, our Ubercart Print on Demand integration hit On Demand Books’ application programming interface (API) again to retrieve the chosen book’s details, where the information was converted on the fly into an e-commerce product and added to the customer’s shopping cart. The resulting user experience was seamless.

Approach and Timeline

This was a project with many moving parts. Initially, it seemed as if it might be challenging for us to coordinate our team, our customer and partners, and their development teams. This actually turned out to be extraordinarily easy, because the individuals from the various teams were wonderful. The clear benefits of this technology were obvious to all of the players, and each individual worked to make the vision a reality. There was no one who was anything but helpful. Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books was especially invaluable in helping make sure everyone understood and agreed with each step of our process. Another good thing was that there was only one person from each team represented, and they were all empowered to make decisions. We also worked very carefully to make our spec brief clear and detailed.

We worked closely with Thor Sigvaldason at On Demand Books, who wrote the API for the Espresso Book Machine at the same time that we were developing the custom module. Thor is brilliant and a total pleasure to work with. We also worked with Githa Nathan, of American Booksellers Association, and Sarah McNally to seamlessly integrate this new functionality into the bookstore's website. We continue to work with McNally Jackson today.

Outcome

This project was a success. Not only was this a clever software solution, it was a creative organizational solution. We love working with forward-thinking organizations who want to try new things, and we love it when organizations partner up to remain competitive. Our hats are off to Sarah McNally of McNally Jackson Books, and other small businesses who are innovating in a competitive industry.