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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.'"
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.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
Oh, there's nothing to worry about. Our overlords will simply reload the matrix.
Duh. Now, get back to metabolizing, coppertop.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
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.
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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?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
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.
May we live long and die out
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.
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.
One thing for sure, this machine can't print Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
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...
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.