Slashdot Mirror
The BookMachine: On-Demand Book Printing in 3-5 Minutes
Photo_Designer writes "Engadget has an article about these cool BookMachines that spit out on-demand books in just a few minutes. Sounds cool. Forget eBooks.. get the real thing!" The company website has some more information, though it's a bit suspiciously skimpy on hard specifications.
I think slashdot has slashdotted itself in the last few days. I keeps showing me all kinds of errors. For example, when I tried to view the comments for this article I got an error page the first time.
This seems really neat, and especially convenient for booksellers to have larger selections of books without having to stock up on physical copies. In fact, it seems very similar to the previously mentioned software on demand" system
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
There's actually quite a lot of Print-On-Demand (POD) publishers out there these days.
Have a look at Publish And Be Damned for example.
(Even CafePress is offering it alongside their tshirts and stuff, though as with their other products, they're quite expensive)
I think the difference with this one is the specific machine, and the speed it produces the book. That's only really important if you're standing in front of the machine at the time.
Maybe we'll get book vending machines outside the supermarkets, and all the bookstores will close down? Or then again, maybe not. If I'm buying books, I like to browse around the store, see what it's got... Find a cover that appeals to me... read a random page to see if I like the writing. A book machine in the mall won't do that for me, so I'll still go to the book store. Or I'll use mail order... in which case it doesn't really make any difference to you whether it takes five minutes or five hour to print, because the shipping time will make that irrelevant
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
Do not promote this government granted business methord intellectual monopoly.
I believe that Xerox had these machines in the mid-90s.
Graphic Arts Monthly has a nice blurb about the machines too (from 1996!).
Nicholas Negroponte in Being Digital talks all about these and how they will play an important part in the switch from 'Atomic Distribution' to 'Bits-is-Bits' business models.
These machine were either a really slow-burn success, or it's just an insanely slow-news day at OSDN. :-)
"Print on demand" systems have been around for almost a decade. They're basically a super-industrial version of your home printer, so it (in theory) doesn't cost any more per book to print one paperback book than 100,000. They're usually used by low volume publishers (i.e. a few hundred to a few thousand). Where they really shine though is when they're used to print entirely customized manuals (i.e. if you sell some modular product you can on-demand print up a version of your manual for your customer which only includes the specific parts that their solution uses).
I think part of the reason that some of these books are out of print is that nobody has bothered, cared, or been able to negotiate with the copyright holder on doing reprints.
this machine probably wont fix that problem, maybe partially (for those books that just havent gotten published because nobody wanted to print them)
It could also be a big boost to public domain books....
though I'd hate to waste the paper and cut down trees...
Still I prefer reading a book over a PDF. books are highly portable, you can carry a book with you almost anywhere. And it doubles as a defense weapon that gains strength by thickness.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
"However, for you and I of the dwindling reading population, it is a neat thing."
It's actually "for you and me." Normally, I wouldn't care, but if you're criticizing the US for being dumb and claiming to be well read yourself, you might as well use correct grammar.
The clock on copyrights can time out based on when the work went out of print. Now publishers can hold on to works indefinitely.
sigs are a waste of space
I'm not sure what kind of technology they are using, but there is www.xlibris.com, which, after an initial setup fee, does one-offs as they are purchased. There is also www.mypublisher.com, which publishes onesie-twosie books for personal use (they are expensive, not much room for markup) and then CafePress has been printing books, although their formatting options are limited. Xlibris will allow you to do color on the regular pages.
I think the idea is that you could go to a store and get a copy.
Of course, but that is not the hypothetical case I was responding to.
KFG
Which is just like downloading an TeX,Latex or DVI encoded file off a central ftp site and proccessing it though to a postscript file and printing and binding the result. Most Universities and tertiary institutions were providing this service by the late 80s. Harvey Ross patented not an invention but a description of an existing service.
THe standard procedure for scanning a book is to cut the spine off and feed the resulting loose pages into a scanner with a sheet-feeder. If it's not fast enough for you, put 1/2 or 1/4 of the pages into two or four such scanners.
21st Century Technology allows piracy in net.time.
Tag lost or not installed.
This has a lot of potential for marketing serials and comic books, which are very popular in asia. Especially if you could print a sample couple of pages of something you were interested in (limited free pages per month, tied to your credit card number) independant comic book publishers and writers who produce serials might want to take a look at this. (the following comment may seem sexist but its my opinion) I also bet women could be targeted if this thing was put in walmarts, supermarkets etc. and carried womens fiction in serial format. I like the idea, where can I buy this nachine ?
Yay me! ^^
That looks suspiciously like a Xerox Docutech with custom front panels.