Introducing the Espresso Book Machine – book printing on demand

In a 29 June Boston Globe article, journalist D.C. Denison visits a traditional Vermont book shop which has invested in an ‘Espresso Book Machine’, and asks ‘Is this the future bookstore?’.

The machine, which allows staff to download books from a database while the customer waits, is from New York company, On Demand Books.

Denison suggests that such a machine might be the saving of the small book shop, that the days of ‘We don’t have it but we can order it for you’ may be on the way out. And it’s been a big hit with authors wishing to self-publish.

It’s worth having a look at the video, available at the Boston Globe link, to see the machine in operation.

For those who like the physical format of the book, and would rather not read online or from printed, loose-leaf A4 pages, this could be a perfect complement to projects like Project Gutenberg and Google Books, and to the growing e-book industry.

It will complement bookshops and libraries well, allowing users to browse through books on shelves and display stands as before, but negating the frustration when a specific book isn’t available.

And much of the guesswork will be taken out of the publishing industry’s need to calculate how many copies of a book to print at a time.

A reader commenting on the Boston Globe article guesses that the repairman will be the only one to benefit. However, the machine is probably less 'clunky' than it first appears. The video, after all, is showing us the inner workings. If the surface reality is somewhat smoother, it will be interesting to see how this develops.

Link to full article.