Most of the money made on each physical copy of a book doesn’t go to the artist behind it, but is instead wrapped up in shipping and production costs, so the only people who will have a reason to be unhappy about ebooks will be the shippers (who are getting $3.00+ on every book I buy on Amazon instead of at a book store, anyway). More money will go to supporting the writers, publishers, editors, and artists who actually make the product, and who will in turn be able to produce more, higher quality books. In the end, everyone is happy. For all those reasons, I think ebooks are great. For other people. So what about people like me who still want to read physical books?
The Espresso Book Machine, from On Demand Books, has the potential to help out throwbacks like myself, and step in along with ereaders to save the admittedly broken business behind our favorite books.
The idea behind the Espresso Book Machine is simple: it’s a vending machine for books. Instead of candy or soda, the Espresso Book Machine will dispense any book that has been digitized and uploaded to its system as a high-quality paperback identical to any you’d find at your nearest bookstore. Not long ago, this wouldn’t have been possible. Publishers would have had to stock the thing with books, just like a bookstore. But thanks to the Internet, digitization, and the floundering publishing industry, this technology is poised to take off, and could offer a desirable alternative to the traditional model.
The current Espresso Book Machine is unwieldy, expensive (they leased for $50k/year in 2007) and can produce only four books an hour. However, the new model EBM 2.0, their new model released in April, is intended for a wider audience. According to On Demand Books’ website, ondemandbooks.com, the new EBM will be able to spit out about 14 books per hour. If left running twelve hours a day, 365 days a year, that is about 60,000 books per year.
If the new EBM 2.0 lives up to its potential, why not have one of these machines in every bookstore? If books are printed out at bookstores instead of shipped in (and out again), this will greatly reduce the costs of book publishing, and could provide a solution to circumvent a model that, although everyone knows it is broken, no one is quite sure how to fix. A stock of several books can be sent –or even created on-site- to keep on the shelves. Once a copy is bought, another is printed out to replace it. This will do away with production and shipping costs, and fewer books will need to be pulped after their brief shelf-life is over.
