Well, by complete coincidence, this past Thursday, at their Charing Cross Road store—which I just happened to be in yesterday.

According to the article about this event, the catalog for EBM 2.0 is greatly expanded:

It is the first bookshop installation of its kind within the UK, allowing any book to be selected from an inexhaustible network of titles and prints on demand in just 3 minutes from a digital file onsite, online at www.blackwell.co.uk, or uploaded in person from CDs or flash drives.

And, as you can see above, it’s still a beast of a machine, but not nearly the Frankenstein-like creature featured in the video we posted back in 2007. Nevertheless, my belief is still that looking toward the future e-books will end up being much more popular than this machine. The fact that you can download a book anywhere, without having to visit a specific location, is still a huge advantage. Especially after you feel the quality of the EBM production . . .

When I was talking to the media class, I claimed that print-on-demand production quality wasn’t that much different than your crappy trade paperback. Well, that’s not exactly true. The books they had on display at Blackwell were pretty cheap—poor cover stock, stiff paper, etc. The quality actually wasn’t that much different than the first p.o.d. titles from back in the late-90s. (When I was there, some guy came in and was asking the EBM operators about the crappy quality, so I’m not the only person who thinks this.)

And in case you can’t remember who’s behind the EBM and On Demand Books, you can find dozens of copies of his own book on display in front of the machine.

The EBM was hailed as a way of creating an “unlimited backlist” where customers could come and print out any title they wanted. And as the technology evolved and the machine gets slicker and smaller, it could become more like an “ATM-like bookshop,” with locations throughout the world. . . .

Of course, this idea of preserving old, hard-to-find books and making them available to readers isn’t the cause of the VPR interview:

Since it was installed, some of the store’s customers have been using the machine to produce hard-to-find books from a huge online database of titles in the public domain. But the store has discovered that the machine is most popular with would-be authors who want to turn what they’ve written into a book.

The short piece—complete with Kinko’s like background noise of books being printed and bound—focuses on the people who come in and get their books printed. Some of the titles Lucy mentions are a college dissertation, a book in Russian about World War II, and a genealogical book that someone printed for a family reunion.

Unless the author prevents it, all of these titles are then made available for sale, and the author can set the retail price and receives 100% of the difference between the retail price and cost of production for each copy sold.

First off, I hope Northshire adds on some service fees to that cost of production, so that they can capitalize on this as it becomes more and more popular (and it inevitably will since this allows aspiring authors to avoid the horrible negligence of the publishing industy).

But the vision of a bookstore as a sort of Kinko’s, or a bricks-and-mortar version of iUniverse sends shivers down my spine. I think of bookstores as one of the gatekeepers of culture, not as a one-stop shop where you can buy Ulysses and print that collection of poems you’ve been putting together.

I’m probably just cynical . . . In party because I’ve never really bought into this Espresso Book Machine idea. The future seems to be more in the ebook realm than in a clunky machine that creates cheap paperbacks. Of course, the ebook world will be subject to way more vanity publications that anything else. . . .

“Now, instead of spending years tracking down Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, you just print it out, go home with a copy of it in your back pocket and finally read it.”

Well, uh, there are two big problems with this. First of, “NYRB”: reprinted Anatomy of Melancholy a number of years ago, so “tracking it down” really consists of typing the words “Anatomy” and “Melancholy” into Amazon, or simply walking into any bookstore in the United States.

And as Evan says, “At 1424 pages, I don’t know that it would be all that easy to put this wonderful tome in your pocket!” Having seen an online video about the EBM, I think it would take about 4 hours to print and bind this book . . .

I’d be more interested in these ideas about the future of the book if they weren’t usually accompanied by silly, unrealistic statements, or if they didn’t involve a gadget with—as —a “weirdly Fahrenheit 451–ish name.”

It’s not the most exciting of pitches, but it’s interesting after talking about it for the past few weeks to actually see this thing in action. . . . And “this thing” might be the best way to describe it. Much more of a Frankenstein machine—slap a printer on at one end, a paper cutter at the other—than an “ATM-like book machine.” Not to say it isn’t cool, but in the age of iPhones and uber-hip digital gadgets, I think On Demand Books is going to have to ramp up it’s aesthetic appeal.

Very well thought out article, with a cautionary paragraph at the end:

More importantly, what does it mean? While there’s certainly work that needs to be done on these machines, they certainly seem viable. Epstein proposed these machines as a solution for a single problem: the unavailable backlist. It’s not hard to imagine, however, that a decade from now the entire bookstore will have been replaced by one of these machines at the FedExKinkosBarnes&Noble. Holding my copy of Faulkner in my hands, the overwhelming feeling was one of cheapness: the book had been reduced, finally, to being a disposable consumer object, available as easily as a latte at Starbuck’s. The books that the Espresso was putting out every twenty minutes existed for demonstration purposes: although passersby oohed and ahed at the possibility of the machine and happily took the sample books, I sensed that the books probably wouldn’t be read.