Xerox and On Demand Books -- makers of the Espresso Book Machine -- are going into business together.

Get your wallets out, copy shops, coffee shops, and bookstores!

From the Xerox press release:

"Xerox and On Demand Books will jointly market and sell, on a worldwide basis, the Xerox 4112 Copier/Printer together with the Espresso Book Machine -- a fully integrated solution that prints, binds, and trims books with full color covers on demand in retail locations and libraries. The Espresso Book Machine can produce paperbacks in variable combinations of trim sizes between 4.5" x 5.0" and 8.25" x 10.5" for a production cost less than one cent per page."



"With the Xerox 4112, the Espresso Book Machine produces a 300-page book in less than four minutes and has the capacity to print more than 40,000 paperback books per year."

The University of Texas Co-op Bookstore is buying one this spring. In two years, these things will be at 711 and you won't even care.

Disposable, instantaneous paperbacks are gonna be everywhere. You'll be able to print up your favorite book and give it a to a pal for nothing, for no effort, like playing a song on a juke box. You'll even be able to pick between multiple covers, or make your own. Then you can sell these books back to the little shop where you bought 'em for a few dollars for other people to pick up who don't mind cheaper, used books.

Get ready for a paperback revolution, the kind we haven't seen since Penguin got cranking after WWII, printing up books so affordable and dirty that you could buy them in vending machines:



All six major publishers are already in negotiations with Apple to make books for their devices. Soon there will be ebooks all over your computers and tablet PCs! Ebooks that are instantly printable on Espresso Machines for a small fee down at the coffee shop!

Publishing means: making beautiful and interesting electronic media, and then making sure that this electronic media prints up real nice "on demand" for people who prefer print.

Publishing means: making sure that the media you make is not restricted to one proprietary device, thus ensuring that you control throughput and dissemination. If people want to make better devices to display the beautiful and interesting electronic books that you make, fair fucks to them.

Bookselling means: printing books instantly on demand, while also buying back used books at fair rates for resale in order to stock your shelves with something.

Avant garde and independent publishing means: the union of physical and electronic media, sold in digital sculptures and other magical objects.

The whole world glutted with books and book seeds, online and on tables!

Books yanked from the cloud like lightning! The cloud seeded by all kinds of angry punks and soulful iconoclasts!

Posted by miracle on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:12:44 -0500 -- permanent link