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.'"

Comments

hear that sound?

[macadamia_harold]

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.

I' not sure if you hear that sound. It's faint, but i'm pretty sure it's lulu.com shriveling up and dying. Much like when you pour salt on a snail.

Re:hear that sound?

[aerthling]

Well, unless that vending machine can also print magical diamond-toothed attachments for its books that are capable of burrowing through the earth to me in rural Australia, I wouldn't worry about lulu.com shriveling up and dying just yet.

Re:hear that sound?

[utopianfiat]

And motivation for the expansion of the vending machine program to such a pissant country. Like say, literacy.

Fixed and bracing for impact. Do with me as you like, mods. *spreads cheeks*

Re:hear that sound?

[kfg]

Now if only they could invent something to get those damned kids off my lawn...

Sometimes the old ways are still the best:

http://www.mossberg.com/products/default.asp?id=5

http://www.mortonsalt.com/consumer/products/foodsa lts/icecreamsalt.htm

KFG

Bah!

[ResidntGeek]

Have people completely given up on the idea that our society won't last forever? Dammit, I'm going to want books when the oil runs out! What will I do if they're all on hard drives?

Re:Bah!

[kimvette]

Oh, there's nothing to worry about. Our overlords will simply reload the matrix.

Duh. Now, get back to metabolizing, coppertop.

Re:Bah!

[Paranoia Agent]

Carbon Monoxide poisoning during severe winter weather actually happens from people burning things(like books, coal etc.) to keep warm. It happens.

pulp

[binarybum]

and the machine is powered by the flow of tears from green party members.

Re:pulp

[Kidbro]

and the machine is powered by the flow of tears from green party members.

Not necessarily.
As I don't live in the USA, I'm not a member of the party you're referring to, but I tend to vote green in our local elections - and I think this may be a good idea, even from an environmental perspective.
The reason is simple; I can be relatively sure that a book printed by this machine will be used. If someone is explicitly asking it to print a specific book, pay the cash for it (as I assume it will come with a fee), and wait seven minutes there's a high probability that there is actually a demand for the book. Compare this with dead tree books available today, that are printed in large series, where a certain percentage of the total amount printed is destined to never be opened at all - much less read.

Nothing makes my environmentalist heart weep as much as resources that are spent but never used.

Re:pulp

[kjart]

and the machine is powered by the flow of tears from green party members.

Why? This would potentially be better for the environment. Rather than a publisher printing X copies of a book, Y of which wont sell (Y may not be much smaller than X, depending on the book) a book is only printed when someone actually wants to buy it. No overstock, no waste.

Re:pulp

[edwardpickman]

Paper is potentially one of the more enviromentally friendly materials availible. The problem is with how the environment is abused with the current system. Farmed trees contribute oxygen and clean polution from the air. Plain bookstyle paper is one of the easiest things to recycle. Cutting down old growth trees for paper is obscene. The timber industry is traditional similar mineral mining. They prefer the scorched earth approch because it's more profitable. Why spend $5 planting a tree when you can cut down existing ones for free. In a lot of areas the government actually builds roads for the timber companies to more easily cut down trees on public land. Paper and lumber can be grown and harvested responsibly. The timber industry will only do it kicking and screaming though. I heard one actually trying to defend clear cutting as good for a forest. Might as well say extinction is good for species. Even todays "selective cutting" involves cutting down all commercial sized trees. Except for the great plains and the deserts of the southwest the country used to be one large forest. In a couple of hundred years we've managed cut down nearly all the old growth trees. Only a few percent remain and the timber industry is fighting to cut down that last few percent.

One word:

[Wilson_6500]

Neller predicts that within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed...

Textbooks

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).

or

[sporkme]

...or have it in digital format for half the price. Plug up a USB compliant storage device (cellphone for instance) and you own it in seven seconds, not seven minutes. If seven seconds is too long, you can download it later from your GoogleBooks account. Your fifteen year old Okidata laser printer could print it, but why waste paper like one of those stupid machines.

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." ;)

Re:or

[sporkme]

And nobody will ever invent a reading gizmo that is bathtub friendly, that's for sure. Do you really soak in a tub and read on a regular basis? It is pretty damned clear to me that this is not going to be an issue in the fairly near future.

People that are proud to own actual copies of actual books will continue to purchase the Real Deal(TM) and not some convenience machine regurgitation. The only toe-hold on sustainability I can see for such a marketing scheme is in airports, for about seven years.

This concept just feels a bit like a photo booth at a mall or amusement park - a nice novelty but not particularly common or successful.

Re:or

[Paranoia Agent]

Put the book vending machine in your tub. I know this is impactical, especially if you enjoy longer books.

Re:or

[Rei]

The situation isn't that simple. Lets look at some of the "PoD People" out there.

  * Would-be authors: For every one book that's published, there's a hundred that aren't. There is a huge glut of supply in books. This drives a lot of authors to desperation. Many turn to vanity presses, foolishly hoping to get big. They think that they have what it takes to be the next J.K. Rowling. They don't. Yes, there are problems with the publishing industry. Much of what makes a bestseller has to do with promotion. But if you can't get a big house to read you or an agent to sign you, odds are bloody good that your work is not that good.

Lower PoD cost will make their day, and hopefully push vanity presses out of business.

For those not familiar with the term, a "Vanity" press is a publisher that you pay to print and (supposedly) promote your book. The reality is that they have no incentive for you to make it big, and so just overcharge you for printing. Lulu and cafepress are a less scummy version of "self publishing": they tend to act only as printers. You'll still go nowhere, but you'll blow less of your money in doing so. This is just the next step.

  * Legitimate publishers: There are some very messed up things in the way that the print world works currently, and it ends up wasting a lot of money.

1) Print run size guestimates. Publishers have to guess at how much a book is going to sell. The larger they guess, the cheaper the unit cost is, but the more likely they'll get stuck with a warehouse full of unsold books. The hope is that PoD will make producing a single book cost the same as producing a large number of books, and that they can produce them as orders come in. One big beneficiary will be small-time authors: if a publisher isn't taking as much of a risk, they can take on more clients and ones less likely to hit it big.

2) Returns. This is a really silly thing about the industry. Big book chains not only get big discounts, but they also get obscenely kind return policies. If a seller orders a bunch of books, they can return them at the publisher's expense if they don't sell. They can do this with a large chunk of their total inventory. Indie bookstores can do this too, but not as much. This blows a huge amount of money in shipping costs. Miss Snark (one of the most famous agent bloggers) once complained about a bookstore that was relocating across the street who simply returned most of their books, then reordered them at the across the street location. Most returns won't get resold, so they're just waste. Cost-effective PoD could seriously alter this situation.

The key is the phrase cost-effective. Cost-effective includes quality as well.

Re:or

[badspyro]

Last time I checked (although that WAS a while ago), Bloomsbury WAS a small publising company, and one that was not particulaly high on J.K Rowlings list of publishers.
Just because some doesn't get published doesn't mean that the book isn't good, it just means that the publisher doesn't think it can be profitable.

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

The manufacturer has a website

[Robotech_Master]

I'm surprised the writeup didn't include the manufacturer's website, which includes a Quicktime movie of the machine in operation. 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.

Seven minutes, But I want it now!

[rumplet]

Actually I was sort of hoping for a device the size of a novel that opens out and has two e-ink pages, godly battery life, huge solid state memory, with no "features", just basic navigation to flip pages and change book files.

Vending machine books is not an obvious idea, but in my opinion it's not very useful either.

Mein Kamft in Comic Sans with Bunny cover

[yosofun]

"The machine can print, align, mill, glue and bind two books simultaneously in less than seven minutes, including full-color laminated covers."

Does this mean I can get a copy of Mein Kamft, hardbound and set in Comin Sans... with a bunny rabbit cover... in seven minutes?

Re:Mein Kamft in Comic Sans with Bunny cover

[Savage-Rabbit]

Does this mean I can get a copy of Mein Kamft, hardbound and set in Comin Sans... with a bunny rabbit cover... in seven minutes?

Why would you want a Ford owner's repair manual in a bunny rabbit cover?

Re:Mein Kamft in Comic Sans with Bunny cover

[wayward_bruce]

You can't get a copy of Mein Kamft unless you write it yourself. Same goes for "comin sans" font; you'd have to design it first.

This trick never works

[DerekLyons]

A machine like this has debuted every other year or so for about the last decade - they have significantly failed to reach either their technical promises (producing crappy quality books) or their commercial goals. (You have to sell a lot of books to make back your initial investment.)
 
Print-on-demand is a solution in search of a problem.

Re:This trick never works

[Kiaser Wilhelm II]

Silly reasoning. Stuff goes out of print because the publisher chooses to obsolete the material. They can't make money off of new stuff and charge new prices for it if people are constantly buying up the old material.

They wouldn't be able to charge a premium on the older stuff like they do now (as collecter's editions or whatever) if they did not restrict the quantity.

Publishing is a racket. I don't really see a demand for this, either.

Re:This trick never works

[DerekLyons]

If you'd presented a description of the problem it solves - I'd say you are correct. But you didn't. (Airy handwaving about imaginary worlds isn't describing a problem.)

Funny, I said enough for you to realise what the problem was: Books falling to such a low interest that traditional publishing means are no longer profitable.

The problem with this problem is... it's not really a problem. As I said, these (POD, not just the POD vending) machines have been introduced (multiple) times as a solution to this 'problem' - but have failed each time. This suggests to me that the problem doesn't actually exist.

Re: How they are wrong

[bluefoxlucid]

You also forgot to mention that we have laws that state that when you cut a tree down in the US, you need to plant 2 more somewhere. These laws theoretically need to be changed because the number of trees will slowly grow; but in reality, all the trees you plant won't grow, and when they get too dense they compete for light and ground resources and some die. Either way, we're not really net killing trees.

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, 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.

Next invention:

[Travoltus]

DRM paper.

Books printed in vending machines that will self destruct in one year and which will automatically shut down copy machines trying to duplicate it.

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:Too slow

[Robotech_Master]

Actually, the video said that depending on the speed of the printers that were used, it might theoretically be able to be as fast as one book per minute. Presumably the one book in seven minutes is the speed that the prototype that's been in operation since March is able to deliver.

Book vending machine?

[drsquare]

Imagine this: You put your $5 in, wait an entire seven minutes for it to print, then the book gets stuck in the coil and doesn't drop down.

550 Page Limit?

[changyang1230]

One thing for sure, this machine can't print Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

And it'll be illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

within about five years On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.'

errrr... every Public Domain book that's ever been printed. And scanned. And proofread....

And the "content" industries will be beavering away buying more copyright laws to lock up content till the stars turn to iron...

420 seconds????

[davidwr]

7 minutes? Can you give me something to read while I'm waiting?

Seriously, for novels, first 10 pages of Chapter 1 loose or stapled, then print the whole book while I get started.

Let's see, assuming all pages are printed 2-up and cut, and assuming 2 printed pages per second, that's 4 book-pages per second of printing time. 550 pages = just under 2:18. Add time for cutting and binding and time for the glue to dry and I could see 3-4 minutes for a 550-page book. If it's a 1 page/second printer, add another 2:18.

If you can do this in full-color on glossy paper in a reasonable period of time for a reasonable price, you will be able to print international magazines anywhere, with local advertising content. Remember, people like reading actual magazines more than they like reading PDFs.

5 cents per page or 0.05 cents per page?

[fantomas]

I think you mean 5 cents - 0.05 dollars per page? that would make 27.50 a book.

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 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.

Re:Too slow

[Planesdragon]

Looks like we've got ourselves a reader. I'd rather stab my eyes out than wait 15 minutes for someone to print a sub-standard crap edition of a book I'm going to buy.

So, you either:

1: Buy exclusively hardcover, thus missing a good majority of the works ever printed (not necessarily a bad thing; you might be down to only 60% crap) and paying a good 300% over the standard

2: Don't understand that your books are likely ALREADY printed using an identical process.

Either way, this thing won't fly (as it's been trying to for the last ten years now) if it doesn't meet the standard of quality.

Wait until 2109

[tepples]

Call me as soon as they produce on of these that can print out Neil Stephenson tomes.

Based on law effective as of 2006 in the United States, Europe, and Australia, and an estimation of the expected life span of a healthy American writer, you may have to wait until 2110 for books whose author is Neal Stephenson to become available on a print-on-demand system.

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

One of the last remnants of humanity

[NineNine]

Books are one of the last remnants of real humanity, in our temporary, disposable, generic, fast-food culture. No matter how much of the rest our lives becomes generic, sterile, and commoditized, I think that people will *never* give up their real books. I know that I never will. This machine isn't nearly as good as my local used book store where I can go through the books, and pick up fantastic books for a few quarters.

Re:The hidden benefit

[symbolic]

The books will be printed on paper that will turn dark after one year, rendering the printed material unusable. Rumor has it that this copy protection scheme can be defeated by drawing a line around the perimeter of each page using a black sharpie, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Okay, for my first order...

[Nom du Keyboard]

On Demand Books will be able to reproduce every volume ever printed.'"

Okay, for my first order I'd like a copy of all the books from the Library at Alexandria please.