Story on NPR:
Have you ever had that frustration of walking into a bookstore, looking for a specific book, and being told it’s out of print or not in stock?
One company wants to put an end to that. In a move some are calling the most significant step in publishing in the last 500 years, a New York company is trying to make books available on demand, printed out locally, rather than centrally as they always have been.
On Demand Books has installed a trial machine in a central London bookstore. It’s called the Espresso machine, but it has nothing to do with coffee beans. This baby’s grinding out books.
See additional text and listen to 4 minute audio piece at NPR.
Wow
This sounds wonderful!
Does each company that purchases the machine, also have to purchase the rights for each book printed, or does it come with a set of titles?
>^..^<
Two million books
Here is what there website says that the machine has access to:
The EBM can now print over two million public domain and in-copyright titles. ODB has a strategic alliance with Lightning Source™ Inc. (“LSI”). LSI, a subsidiary of the Ingram Book Group (the world’s largest wholesale distributor of books), is the industry’s premier POD distributor of books. Its digital database includes over a million titles from over 6,500 publishers. ODB has the use of LSI’s digital conversion facilities and the right to print LSI’s vast library of titles, pending publisher approval. In addition, the EBM has access to more than one million public-domain books through the Open Content Alliance (a joint effort by Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe, and the Internet Archive to create a digital database of high-quality scans of out-of-copyright books) and titles from other repositories. Content is expected to increase substantially as more EBMs are adopted by bookstores, libraries, and other venues across the globe.