Comments on: Exploding books: Decaf prose

By: Alan Kellogg

Alan Kellogg — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:25:33 +0000

Keep in mind that this is but a step in a process. As time goes by and the technology improves, you’ll see hardbacks and possibly even text quality books coming out. Distributed printing is on it’s way.

By: Old Grouch

Old Grouch — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:31:15 +0000

Dan, I don’t see this as being “the demise of browsing the aisles,” but as a way for stores to deliver “any book in about an hour.” A good full-service bookstore does a significant percentage of its business as special orders (”long tail,” y’know). On-demand printing helps the store compete with the on-line merchants: Amazon (if in stock): A day or two, or overnight with express shipping. Fred’s Neighborhood Books: Go have a cup of coffee, and it’ll be waiting when you’re done.

BTW, as to quality issues, IIRC IBM already has a system that’s being used by some of the big distributors. The look-and-feel of its output is supposed to be similar to better paperbacks (think Dover), although I don’t believe it uses sewn signatures.

This is exactly the kind of thing the music cartel (*spit*) should have done years ago. Any-CD-in-about-an-hour might have extended the life of the format (and kept a lot of retailers in business), by keeping the customers off the internet (where they found just what they wanted was available free!).

By: dfrisme

dfrisme — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:15:15 +0000

Clearly the type of books to be produced by the Expresso device are intended to be used (and used up) rather than collected. The World Bank’s target audience are almost certainly users rather than collectors. And they are probably in parts of the world where decent tablet readers will be a while coming. It makes a lot of sense for them.

I own a book printed in the 1700s, a law book entitled _A Treatise on Ejectment_, that is printed on vellum paper and beautifully stitch bound. It is a wonderful artifact that has a value that is more dependent on its physical attributes than its intellectual content (at least to me. I’m not a legal historian.)

The kind of books that one would buy in glue bound paperback, on cheap paper, are exactly the kind of books I would rather have on a decent tablet reader. Books that are primarily artifacts, like art books, photo albums, chap books, and various collectors items, should be stitch bound on archival paper.

There are already several vendors that produce more or less archival print on demand volumes from your digital photos or PDFs. They are not that expensive, about on par with a decent art book.

By: Dan Blank

Dan Blank — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 16:11:11 +0000

I would like to see the quality of these express printed volumes. I fear that a system like this would strike solidly in the middle ground of the two sides - but be beloved by no one. This may solve a problem for publishers, but does may not address all of the needs of readers looking for a publishing system that takes advantage of the information explosion. Likewise, book lovers may not like the idea of a cheap printing and demise of browsing the aisles of a book store.

By: dfrisme

dfrisme — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 15:31:54 +0000

About 10 years ago, a booklet making machine, that is a machine that ingested collated printouts and produced saddle stapled booklets, costs about five grand. Now we have a fancy color printer at work that hooks up to the network and can output collated, 3 hole punched front and back pages or saddle stapled booklets. It cost something on the order of $10,000. The output is very nice.

According to the article, the Expresso Machine produces paperback volumes. I assume this means glue bound rather than stitched.

This is pretty cool, and I can think of a lot of uses, but eventually, what I really want is a decent tablet reader. Something about the size of a comic book or trade paperback, about 1/4 inch thick. A flip-open that displayed two pages and lived a nice leatherette binder would be nice. It should at least display HTML with stylesheets and PDFs (I’m not interested in DRM junk. My money, my choice.)

Networked access to my online library would be required, so it might as well have access to the rest of the internet. Ergonomically, it would need to be practical and comfortable to use in the typical household library annex (that little room down the hall…)