Books on Demand

DreamerFi writes: "It's going to cost about $30k. Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes. Having finished with one title, it can proceed to another and another, as long as the machine is kept supplied with ink, toner, and paper-the same regular copy paper you might buy at Staples. It's called the PerfectBook Machine. How soon before your local book store has one?"

Comments

This is more than a printer, it is a revolution!

[Chris Frost]

"Working from a digital file, it can print, bind, and trim a book of any size in a matter of minutes."

Wow. The scalability of this things is awesome! To be able to make books at the nanolevel all the way up to ones with enough pages to bridge the earth and moon! The implications of this new technology reaches far beyond any printing system, that's for sure.
To be able to cut paper of *any* size, whether having a length of the sun's or an atom's diameter. Amazing.
And talk about strong bindings!

Iuniverse Print on Demand

[LetterJ]

I figured this would be pretty much common knowledge among /. readers, but I guess not.

Iuniverse.com has been using something similar for quite a while to allow people to self-publish. For $99 or so, your book gets put in a format these machines understand, assigned an ISBN number and entered in the Ingram book database. Amazon and BN then can sell your book. The books only get printed when someone orders one and then shipped out. The more successful ones sometimes end up on BN shelves in the brick-n-morter stores.

A great many of the books have been utter drek, but for those looking to get a few copies of their novel out, it's worth it. They are also targeting companies for internal manuals and custom books, professors who write their own texts, authors whose books are out of print, etc. If Amazon or your local Borders got one of these machines, it's still likely that a service like this would exist to get your book into the system.

Re:Uses for this machine

[Robotech_Master]

The big revolutionary use for this thing lies in keeping mass-published books in print. Say I wanted a book that was published back in '84, but is now out of print and the only way I can find it is by ordering it via one of Amazon's used book stores. Well, if this thing were set up, and enough old books were on file, I could just go down and have them print me out a copy. Which means the author would get a royalty from it, instead of the nothing he would get from me buying used.

Of course, the problem is that a lot of authors' contracts specify that the rights to shop their books to other publishers revert to them when the books go "out of print." If a POD-able book might be considered never to be out of print, we might be looking at another Tasini fight.

--

Frequent Flyer's Principle

[American AC in Paris]

from the article:

The most esoteric taste could, in theory, be satisfied anywhere and anytime: Running to catch the 6 a.m. flight to Denver, you could stop at an airport kiosk and buy a title as obscure as Thomas Merton's The New Man just as easily as you now pick up a copy of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher.

...sheesh. For whatever reason, visionaries and pundits alike seem to think that the following scenario is some holy grail of everyday events:

• <person> is running to catch a flight;
• for some reason, <person> wishes to purchase <product in question> first; and
• Cannot rely on the old way of getting <product in question>, as it does not provide <specific parameter> that only <hot new technology> can provide.

*sigh*

Folks, I fully endorse giving bogus information to online surveys, but honestly. We've got to stop telling them that we address most of our shopping, reading and entertainment needs while running to catch our daily transcontinental flight. This is getting nutty.