What is this strange-looking machine, I hear you ask – and why has he got a picture of a 1915 poetry book?
Well, this is one of only 12 “Espresso Book Machines” in the world – I went to see it in Blackwell’s bookshop in London when I visited earlier this week.
These machines are linked to a website www.archive.org – which holds at present over 400,000 out of print books on PDF files. Simply choose which book you want, and this machine will print, bind and cover it for you in about 5 minutes – while you watch. How brilliant is that? OK, the cost is £10 plus 2p per page, but I guess that will come down in the future….
Once they’ve got some copywrite issues sorted out, I can foresee a situation where you can wander in and just ask them to produce any book you fancy. How cool would that be? What a huge saving on printing costs, transport costs, paper – not printing thousands of books that end up being thrown away because no-one wants them?
Even better, if you have an unpublished novel tucked away somewhere – they’ll print it for you (maybe I’ll finish mine off now…)
Even though the machine was temporarily “out of order” when I visited, I was so impressed, I bought a copy of the first book they made on it – a small volume of poetry from Oxford undergraduates in 1915. Nothing too remarkable about that, I hear you say – apart from the fact that included in it are poems by Godfrey Elton (later to become a famous Historian and uncle of Ben Elton), Dorothy L Sayers (author not only of the “Lord Peter Wimsey” novels, but also the Guinness “Toucan” adverts), and JRR Tolkien – already writing about goblins, fairies and leprechauns even at that early age.
This book is now in library stock, under non-fiction 821 OXF. (Don’t ask me why poetry is always classified as non-fiction under Dewey. It just is. Always has. Always will be. Don’t try and give me a headache, now….)
For further information on the Espresso Book Machine, click on the link below and watch the video)
http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/editorial/browse/espresso.jsp;jsessionid=045C028C5DD5D0989948657D707DFAFA.bobcatt1
Well, this is one of only 12 “Espresso Book Machines” in the world – I went to see it in Blackwell’s bookshop in London when I visited earlier this week.
These machines are linked to a website www.archive.org – which holds at present over 400,000 out of print books on PDF files. Simply choose which book you want, and this machine will print, bind and cover it for you in about 5 minutes – while you watch. How brilliant is that? OK, the cost is £10 plus 2p per page, but I guess that will come down in the future….
Once they’ve got some copywrite issues sorted out, I can foresee a situation where you can wander in and just ask them to produce any book you fancy. How cool would that be? What a huge saving on printing costs, transport costs, paper – not printing thousands of books that end up being thrown away because no-one wants them?
Even better, if you have an unpublished novel tucked away somewhere – they’ll print it for you (maybe I’ll finish mine off now…)
Even though the machine was temporarily “out of order” when I visited, I was so impressed, I bought a copy of the first book they made on it – a small volume of poetry from Oxford undergraduates in 1915. Nothing too remarkable about that, I hear you say – apart from the fact that included in it are poems by Godfrey Elton (later to become a famous Historian and uncle of Ben Elton), Dorothy L Sayers (author not only of the “Lord Peter Wimsey” novels, but also the Guinness “Toucan” adverts), and JRR Tolkien – already writing about goblins, fairies and leprechauns even at that early age.
This book is now in library stock, under non-fiction 821 OXF. (Don’t ask me why poetry is always classified as non-fiction under Dewey. It just is. Always has. Always will be. Don’t try and give me a headache, now….)
For further information on the Espresso Book Machine, click on the link below and watch the video)
http://bookshop.blackwell.co.uk/jsp/editorial/browse/espresso.jsp;jsessionid=045C028C5DD5D0989948657D707DFAFA.bobcatt1
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