The EBM is the product of On Demand Books (ODB), a company started in 2003 by Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House, and Dane Neller, former CEO of Dean & Deluca. (The pair met when Random House published The Dean & Deluca Cookbook.) Epstein is no stranger to innovation: He is credited with inventing the trade paperback format as an editor at Doubleday in the 1950s. A St. Louis–based engineer named Jeff Marsh had already built a prototype of the kind of machine Neller and Epstein were looking for; from there ODB developed the software and forged distribution agreements with publishers as well as content aggregators like Google.