New machine prints paperbacks on demand for $8 in four minutes | Hacker News Reader

New machine prints paperbacks on demand for $8 in four minutes

seekingalpha.com

23 pointsrms20 comments

If you to submit an article that has an uninformative and sensationalized headline like "The World of Book Publishing Is About to Change", please edit it to something more reasonable. In this case, might I suggest "New machine at Harvard prints paperbacks on demand for $8 in four minutes".

Ok.

For that matter, the Harvard Book Store is not part of Harvard University. It is an independent bookstore.

If I remember right from my summer in Cambridge, it's basically a rebranded Barnes and Noble, yes?

No; you're thinking of the actual HU bookstore, the Coop.

Ya that's right, now I remember

My local blackwells has had a similar service for a while. The trouble is they charge more for an on-demand book than an off the shelf one. I've never seen anyone use the service.

I remember hearing about this, and was hoping for the price to be about half what it is. This is a great opportunity for physical books, but it won't be all that feasible until the cost for the on-demand books are significantly cheaper.

The University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) also has one of these. I'm not sure when it was introduced, but I think it was at the start of this term. Thankfully, it is cheaper than off-the-shelf books (at least the two or three titles I looked at were).

Does anyone have a link to a video of it at work? I'd like to see it in action.

Just a note that this machine is at Harvard Book Store, which is an independent business and not part of Harvard University as the shortened HN title might suggest.

Interesting! That's cheaper than an amazon 'e-book', and when you're done with it you can give the book away to the next person.

Yes, but Scribd E-books can be copied in the blink of the eye and without exchanging any money at all.

DRM, sure you could copy a book who's copyright has expired, but there have been DRM issues with those too. Also many people, me included, prefer the feel of paper.

It is difficult to determine just what, exactly is so revolutionary about this device. Is it that it is small and easy enough for an untrained operator to run? Is it affordable enough for a bookstore to install?

I ask, because on-demand book printing is nothing new, and $8 a book has been achievable for a long time. Lulu.com does it with Xerox iGen3's and 4's, attached to perfect-binding equipment, with a really snazzy workflow that automates everything from order to shipping. Of course, a single-machine setup requires a trained operator and about $1 million. (I'm a certified iGen4 operator, but not affiliated with Lulu).

I'd guess these don't require trained operators, but the difference that the article specifies is that the new machine costs $100,000. So it's an order of magnitude difference from the existing solutions.

Unanswered is if this has superior print/bind quality compared to existing print on demand solutions.

I just helped set one of these up yesterday at a book store(networking, port forwarding, etc.). Its pretty badass, though I haven't seen it in action yet. Its going to access google's scanned books too!

To answer teilo's question, is it hard to use? Once the IT is set up, can a minimum wage employee reasonably operate the machine?

Remember how in Babylon5 they would turn in yesterday's printed newspaper to get today's news printed on the recycled pages? I think we are headed that way. Because reading on paper just has a certain handiness to it no matter how sophisticated our portable devices are.

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