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Thursday, September 17, 2009

Books Here Comes a Game-Changer?

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 10:28 AM

I've written about the Espresso Book Machine before, but here's a little bit of a refresher course:

...now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand Books, is letting readers turn digital copies back into paper copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000 Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk. (The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a year.)

Third Place Books just announced on their Twitter feed that they're buying an Espresso Book Machine this fall, which I believe will make them the first store in Washington. I hope to go give it a trial run when it arrives.

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WANT

Posted by xilip on September 17, 2009 at 10:33 AM

Gutenberg would poop himself with excitement at the sight of such a contraption. Hell, I probably will too.

Posted by UNPAID COMMENTER on September 17, 2009 at 10:58 AM

Oh please Oh please Oh please Oh please Oh please Oh please pretty pleeeeeeeeeeeze! So. Ahsum.

Posted by Zoroastronomer on September 17, 2009 at 11:01 AM

http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/16/copyrig…

Posted by chong on September 17, 2009 at 11:01 AM

village books in bellingham, wa has one.

Posted by lg on September 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM

"The machine prints the pages, binds them together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk."

The terms "perfect bound" and "perfect binding" are technical terminology referring to a manufacturing process, not a maximum degree of conformance to a qulaitative ideal. I suspect the reporter mistook the industry term for a celebration of production quality.

Posted by pedant on September 17, 2009 at 11:32 AM

@6, nice try, but perfect binding is indeed exactly what these machines do. It just means the sheets are all bound together at the back in one lump, as opposed to being gathered in folded signatures first. There's no thread or staples in perfect binding. Your New Yorker Style Issue is perfect-bound, unlike most issues, which are folded and stapled.

I'd be a lot more excited about this if their list wasn't restricted to that pre-1923 list, virtually of which is widely available as even cheaper used paperbacks, often in dozens of editions. Out-of-copyright publishing is a mug's game.

What I want is to be able to print in-copyright but out-of-print books, so I don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for rare copies. Google has tons of these scanned, but it's very irritating that they won't show you the whole book, instead giving you "pages 247-283 are not a part of this preview". Also: foreign books not available in this country, at least not without insane shipping costs.

Will this machine preserve publisher's fonts, or, like the Kindle, will it impose the same ineptly kerned garbage on every single book?

Posted by Fnarf