Imagine going into a bookstore and buying a book out of a machine. It would be like looking through a jukebox or an ATM where you would browse for titles. You would make your choice and wait for it to be printed for you right there. Sound like the wave of the future? That’s just what the Espresso does.
The Espresso is a $50,000 vending machine that can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes with full-color laminated covers. The book ATM has an upper page limit of 550 pages but it can print in any language and even accommodate right-to-left texts. On Demand Books, founded by Jason Epstein and Dane Neller, is the company behind the Espresso though the technology was developed by Jeff Marsh, the advisor for On Demand Books.
To an extent the reading public is already familiar with the concept of printing books on demand. Places like Café Press.com and Lulu.com print books on demand and ship them to you. These books of course are mostly self-published. But these sites are also large enough to have garnered some attention and if they can do it why shouldn’t a machine in a bookstore?
Where can you find one near you? Good question. Although it seems as if the World Wide Web is buzzing with this information the actual product seems hard to find. Linesay Irvine at the Guardian informs us that Blackwell’s, a book seller in the UK, will be the first of its kind to offer this service but not until the fall in an undisclosed location. Eventually Blackwell’s would like to install the machines in all of its 60 locations in the UK.
Article comments