Book Machine at Harvard Bookstore | Hacker News Reader

Book Machine at Harvard Bookstore

adverlab.blogspot.com

18 pointsJakob10 comments

I wrote a better article about the Espresso Book Machine about five months ago. It has quite a few more details for those who are interested.

http://inkweaver-review.blogspot.com/2009/05/espresso-book-m...

There's one here in Melbourne already, out of 15 in the world. http://www.ondemandbooks.com/our_ebm_locations.htm We usually get cool stuff last.

$US100,000 is a long way from mass-market, but we already have cheap home/office colour laser printers, so it seems conceivable. Imagine one in every library, kinkos, post office, video store... very science fiction.

Yeah it is very far off from the mass-market yet. And the problem is that before the price goes down it will have to reach a sort of saturation point after which its own popularity will take over.

You're lucky to live near on of the fifteen in the world. ;)

Actually, it doesn't sound too promising:

This bookstore has an Espresso Book Machine which sometimes works. http://www.librarything.com/venue/34802/Angus-&-Robertso...

I went and had a look, but it wasn't running. Apparently, it's usually on between 10am and 3pm (though that's not stated on their website).

There was a sample book, and though the cover and binding were great, the printing was a significantly less bold than a real book. Maybe low toner, but that was the show-off "sample" book... The print also looked just like those pdf's you see of scanned books - not as good as a real book. I was unimpressed, because I think it could easily look much better.

The catalog is only about 100 books, more expensive than I'd thought, starting at about $16 AUD (about $14 USD). Range should change with Google's massive out-of-copyright catalog - price too, I hope.

This is very cool tech. Hopefully it finds it's way to pretty much everywhere. It's a mystery to me why it hasn't shown up in every Border's and Barnes & Nobles yet. I'd gladly pay a few bucks to get some classic literature printed on demand.

http://www.thesponty.com/events/242040/Unveiling_of_The_Book...

is that some kind of twitter-clone?

Why not just link to the actual Harvard Book Store event page?

http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=2390

video of version 1 http://www.bookshop.unimelb.edu.au/bookshop/p?Z.ebm

video of version 2 http://www.ondemandbooks.com/video2.htm

The videos have a boring start but become cool.

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