NEW MACHINE PRINTS WHOLE BOOK ON DEMAND
Tree Hugger - The Espresso Book machine prints, slices, binds and spits out a copy of a book on demand. Rather than printing X copies of a book and sending them off to stores to sit on shelves, or gather dust in warehouses until a buyer places an order, books are going on-demand. The Espresso Book Machine was just launched by Blackwell and will be a boon to people looking for out-of-print editions, or novelists looking to print a copy or two of their own work.
According to the Daily Mail:
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Blackwell's aim is that the customer will be able to browse a catalogue in a kiosk next to the machine then press 'Make Book' and watch as their novel is created. First the cover is run off, then the pages are printed and collated.
The pages are then clamped and glue applied to the spine. In the final stage, the pages are stuck to the cover before being trimmed to size from A4. The completed book then pops out of a slot in the side of the machine.
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A 300-page out-of-print book would end up costing around $40-45, which is a bit pricey and will make people consider for awhile before pressing "print." But if someone really wants a hard copy book, it's not too expensive.
posted by TPR | 6:06 PM
3 Comments:
This is so exciting, I would love to get all my old favorites that are out of print, sometimes I buy them on amazon for too much money.
They're essentially edge-glued xeroxes. Very cheesy and fragile.
It might be an acceptable technology for a gotta-have book unobtainable in any other way and that won't be read much, but anyone who wants more than one such book would do better to buy a large-format laser printer and learn how to do one-off sewn-signatures binding by hand-it's not difficult.
This technology has been available for more than a decade.
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