Mocha Book, Grande, with cream?

Good news of the week is that Blackwells have switched on the first Espresso Book Machine in a UK bookshop, in their Charing Cross Road Branch. Pádraig Ó Méalóid called in the Beginning of the End for bookshops? in his Livejournal but I like it. The EBM will deliver Print On Demand books in under 3 minutes. I think it will be a boon for small bookshops.  My retirement plan, after UCC was always for a wee book & coffee shop in a seaside town where I could amble into (more) senility dispensing wisdom, books and coffee to ungrateful customers, and a little POD machine fits in well with that.

Mind you, I have felt the POD books are indeed poorly made, and sometimes feel poorly designed as well, but I imagine they will iron out the bugs in a few years. For some reason current POD books are often poorly bound, and the paper is often not quite the right size – they seem to default to the horrible ‘trade paperback’ size which does not suit books designed for the old ‘proper’ paperback size.  I don’t know if the EBM suffers from these, but no doubt we will see reviews in the Sunday papers this week.

Attaching it to a recycling facility so you can, if you wish, recycle your old books would be good. There is an obvious synergy between POD and paper recycling.

Presumably, if it can print from CD or USB, it is only a short step away from vending ebooks as well, if you prefer that format.  I don’t much got for ebooks; DRM annoys me. If I buy a book, I want to own it and be able to use it as I wish, when and where I wish, and not be stuck with reading it only on a limited number of platforms.  Mind you, I do use books a lot, and I do use techa lot so I regularly migrate all my stuff from one techtoy to the next. I guess the average user buys abook, reads in once or occassionally twice, and hardly cares if they can’t carry it with them to their new reading platform.  I need course texs and reference works to move with me, which is why I usually buy a paper copy, photograph it myself, and carry them as a folder of jpegs.

The POD revolution does, as the press release points out, make it easier for everyone to get into self-publishing. Now I know that opens the door to a wave of badly written junk getting onto paper. However, they do say that everyone has at least one novel in them, and I think everyone should be allowed, and even encouraged to write that and and let their friends buy a copy to read. It is true that not everybody’s internal novel is not always good, and should not be allowed to roam too freely, but I expect we will see a future in which publishers are less important as guardians of quality, and reviewing and recommendation systems are more important. Let’s face it, publishers will put out some fairly poor stuff anyway, and customer reviews on sites like Amazon, as well as in the papers and online already provide a better guide to what you might like to read.  The dynamics of independent music are already working out as an improvement on the dying dinosaurs of the recording industry, and if POD throws a lifeline to small presses and helps foster an independent book scene, so much the better.

I can see a big market for the EBM in holiday spots. Right now, I want one in Malaga Airport or the Marbella Marriot so went I get there next week, I can print my holiday books without having to lug them on Ryanair. (Although lug is hardly the word- I have a Domke photographers jacket which easily fits 2 600 pagers and my netbook. Vitally important for book lovers going on holiday.)


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