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Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Books Bookstores Can Be Publishers Now

Posted by on Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:35 PM

In this week's books section, I write about the brand-new Espresso Book Machine up at Third Place Books. It can publish any of the millions of titles in Google Books for $8 a pop. And that's just for starters:

Books-CLICK-3.jpg
  • Kelly O
Printing out-of-print books is pretty neat, and so is the fact that the bookstore now has almost-immediate access to 800,000 contemporary print-on-demand titles (like The Tooth Fairy and A Frolic of His Own) that would normally take four to six weeks for a brick-and-mortar bookstore to acquire (the EBM exponentially increases Third Place's stock from 200,000 titles to millions), but it's not the device's major selling point.

I hope you'll go read the whole thing. Kelly O took some extra photos for your online enjoyment, too.

And also, Third Place employee Vladimir Verano has started a blog titled Adventures in a Post-Gutenberg Universe chronicling his work on the Espresso Book Machine (which he has named "Ginger") and the weird, lost books that are suddenly available again.

A sampling of titles shows how diverse people's interests are: "American Nervousness", "Invisible Storytellers: Voice-over narration in American Fiction Film", "Cooking with Spices for Dummies", "Adventures of Piang The Moro Jungle Boy", "Education, Health Knowledge, and Child Health in Coastal Ghana", "Autobiography of a Super-Tramp". An even balance of Google Editions & in-print titles shows Google was onto something when they first started digitizing vast collections of books.

This is an exciting time to be a bookseller.

 

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