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The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

sparkchaser

sparkchaser

Administrator and Stuntman
Staff member
The Man Who Took on Amazon and Saved a Bookstore

How? By filling a niche market.

Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon. The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Book Store like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.

You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes. Ben Franklin would be impressed.
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Now when I see that a book I want is OOP, I know where to search for a copy.
 
How long does it take to print a book? Could a customer order an OOP book and have it in his hands in ten minutes? The story says that the book is indistiguishable from books from a professional printer, so that implies it prints glossy color covers too. If my local bookstore had it, I would use it if for no other reason than the novelty.

There are small publishers reprinting OOP books. Years ago I was searching for a 1960s book that had gone out of print and it was selling for several hundred dollars, so I passed. Then more recently I searched again and some company called BN Publishing had it for sale for $10. The printing looked unproffesional, as if the book had been pressed down on a copy machine.
 
If the Harvard Bookstore that I know of is in danger, then that in itself would really be news. But four minutes and commercial quality also counts. I would like to see the gadget and its output.
 
Hugh said:
How long does it take to print a book? Could a customer order an OOP book and have it in his hands in ten minutes? The story says that the book is indistiguishable from books from a professional printer, so that implies it prints glossy color covers too. If my local bookstore had it, I would use it if for no other reason than the novelty.

There are small publishers reprinting OOP books. Years ago I was searching for a 1960s book that had gone out of print and it was selling for several hundred dollars, so I passed. Then more recently I searched again and some company called BN Publishing had it for sale for $10. The printing looked unproffesional, as if the book had been pressed down on a copy machine.
Click to expand...

I have not seen one of these Espresso Book machines but I have heard good things about them. Perhaps an adventurous member of BAR would want to make a field trip and report back.
 
Hmmm very awesome and interesting article. See what happens when a big corporation pisses off the little guy? Is amazon gonna take a huge loss? No, prolly not. But the principal alone is beast :) What is more people did this by example. Hundreds or Thousands of people doing this... then Amazon might get a little butt hurt.

I never heard of this though. I would guess the Ink cost would hurt the wallet a little bit though.
 
Here's a video of the Espresso machine in operation. The end shows a few seconds of the finished product.

Espresso Machine Demo

It looks like it's a standard laser printer with an attached robot to bind and cut the A4 or 8.5x11 paper into the final size. They mention four color printing for the cover. I would think that you could pay extra to provide your own paper - perhaps a high quality linen for archival purposes.
 
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