Vending Machine For Books Coming Next Year

An anonymous reader writes "CNN writes about a $50,000 machine that can print books on demand. It can print up to 550 pages and put a binding on the book in seven minutes. It will be debuting in a select number of U.S. libraries in 2007. The machine is the 'output' end of a service called On Demand Books, which is also just debuting. From the article: 'Some 2.5 million books are now available - about one million in English and no longer under copyright protection. On Demand accesses the volumes through Google and the Open Content Alliance, among other sources. [Co-founder Dane] Neller predicts that within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.'"

Re:or

[fortunato]

Probably because books are a handy, cheap format to have information in. I can sit in my hot tub and read a book. I won't do that with my latest electronic gizmo of the day. Its cheaper to replace the book than my gizmo if I accidentally drop what I'm reading in the water. And I can always just dry out the book and it still "works." ;)

The manufacturer has a website

[Robotech_Master]

I'm surprised the writeup didn't include the manufacturer's website [ondemandbooks.com], which includes a Quicktime movie of the machine in operation [ondemandbooks.com]. It's a pretty neat-looking machine, though considerably larger than the "ATM for books" illustration that they came up with for the news story would suggest—about the size of one of those huge printers that sit behind the counter at Kinko's.

That has to be a prototype

[Animats]

Watched the video. The binder is huge, slow, and has way too many moving parts. Far too much paper handling. Looks like a prototype, too.

Worse, the price/performance is terrible. This $50,000 mechanical nightmare can only bind about 60 books per hour. Compare this IBIS automatic binder [ibis-bindery.com], which can produce 6000 books per hour; 12000 if you get some extra options.

A more fundamental question: Perfect bound books are made by doing a binding job that isn't perfect, then cutting off the edges to make the block of paper uniform. Maybe it would be easier to develop a better way of aligning the paper and using paper that's dimensionally uniform.

Re:Too slow

[AuMatar]

It will- for rare books and out of prints. If I'm looking for a book by my favorite author, I'll happily wait 15 minutes, rather than be told its out of stock and needs to be special ordered.

Re:or

[kfg]

Your fifteen year old Okidata laser printer could print it, but why waste paper like one of those stupid machines.

Because a good book is not a waste of paper and my 1895 printing of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland works just as well today as the day it was new.

Of course it's hardbound. My paperback copy of The Blind Watchmaker is now effectively a loseleaf edition. We are Devo. Dee Eee Vee Ooh!

KFG

Re:One word:

[Legion303]

"but damn 5 bucks if I ordered through this thing"

No. A penny per page is the *production* cost--what it costs the machine's owner in raw materials and electricity to print. Also it appears to be currently limited to the sort of books you can get on Project Gutenberg (i.e., public domain).

Xerox already did it

[nothermark]

Xerox has been selling the books on demand idea since they got digital printers working. The only thing added with this is the vending machine front end that let's one pick the book. Check out http://www.dngoodchild.com/front_pg_7-06.htm [dngoodchild.com] for commercial on demand printer of out of copyright books. BTW, 3 cents per page is for low volume Xerographic printing or maybe what color is approaching. B&W is around 1 cent per page on a large volume machine.

Clueless CNN

[InklingBooks]

This CNN reporter, like many of her colleagues, is utterlessly clueless, knowing about as much about this topic as a reporter who'd breathelessly report, circa 1925, that Oldsmobile had a revolutionary new factory that would turn out a new invention called the automobile, powered by gasoline, which would replace the horse and buggy. Notice the use of "legendary" to describe a flesh-and-blood person, Jason Epstein. That's a good indication of a fluff-headed, hysteria-inclined journalist. King Arthur is legendary. Epstein isn't.

This technology has been around and in wide use for years. Print on Demand has trade journals and is a routine part of publishing today. Tens of thousands of the books you find on Amazon are POD books. Some publishing companies, including my own, are built around a POD model. One printing company, Lightning Source, where I do business, recently upped its POD production capacity from one to three million books a month. Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge University presses all release some scholarly works POD and have for years.

True, there hasn't been much effort to put the machinery into bookstores or libraries, but that's merely a matter of economics and quality. Will there be enough demand to cover the cost of this $50,000 machine and its maintenance? Will the books be reasonably priced and not poor quality? Think of all the troubles you have had with copy machines in libraries. This machine is far more complex, so how likely is it to be well maintained? POD books can look quite good, as good in quality as most traditionally published books. But that's because they're printed in factories with experienced staff overseeing far larger and more expensive machinery. An economy of scale keeps the quality high and the cost low.

Don't be so quick to believe what you hear from news outlets such as CNN.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle